


sunday is mine

by earliegrey



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Future AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-03-30 08:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3930604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earliegrey/pseuds/earliegrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After ten or so years, Taiga doesn’t expect to see him at his door with boxes full of clothes and magazines, bringing back something like order to his rather chaotic life.</p><p>(Kagami is a firefighter, Aomine is a police officer; they share a tiny unit with one bedroom, and they’re completely platonic. Really.)</p><p>[update: discontinued;]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Earlie here.
> 
> If anyone knows me they'd know I take a millennium and a half to finally get to posting anything on ao3. I've actually been writing this since October of last year and have quite a bit racked up in terms of how many words. Hopefully I can keep going ahaha...;; I spent so long trying to figure out how to organize this universe and how to make use of all the small bits I already had written down.
> 
> Originally I really just wanted a normal, fluffy verse, but somehow things took a little darker, somewhat melancholic turn, but it'll still be kind of fluff and nothing too painful...(I hope.) It's not the most original of story ideas, I know, but ah wells, there's never enough IF verses out there, ya feel?
> 
> But anyways, this entire verse is made up of just pieces of drabbles strung up together (actually, most of my stories are that way.;; )
> 
> Disclaimer: They live in a fictional area named Shiba in Tokyo, and I'm doing my best to contain some cultural notes in as well, however a lot of things have the most minimal research. Also, I'm aware that having Kagami living in that kind of situation is somewhat unrealistic, but please bear with me. Please read with a grain of salt!
> 
> As always, please excuse any typoes and mistakes you might find. I'll edit it some other day...
> 
> **Also rating will change...later, muchh later...when I get there. /cries

Taiga wakes up with a start to a stifling heat, dust floating across his eyes, and streaks of light filtering through the curtains left behind by the old tenant.

It takes him a few moments to even his stuttering breaths, to remind himself that it's sweat on his back and not dirt and burnt wood.

Taiga slowly registers the soft beeping of his cell phone alarm. Blindly throwing his hand around, he snags it from above his head, and brings the screen close to his face, squinting at it.

It's barely five.

He takes a while to close his eyes and breathe again, forgetting the details of the night's dream; it wasn't something pleasant he wanted to remember anyways. Opening his eyes, Taiga swipes the snooze button on the phone, the tune mingling in with the the buzz of cicadas outside. There are several unread emails and a pop-up announcement flickering on the display of his phone and he sorts through them.

It's nothing important, just advertisements and the daily weather report.

Taiga lets his hand fall back down to his side. He stretches and feels the rigid floorboard against his muscles.

The sitting cushions he had laid in a neat line for his bedding the night before are scattered out of arm’s reach and pile against cardboard boxes, which he really should spend time clearing out soon.

He yawns, feeling the laziness sink back into his bones.  

He’ll do it later.

Sleep calls for him again despite the dried sweat on his skin from the heat of a windless day; he feels lazy, tired—actually, he's always been kind of exhausted lately.

Taiga makes a face at the sunlight streaking across his eyes and he covers his head with a tossed shirt nearby; it smells like a closet and mothballs but honestly, he's so tired he doesn't have it in him to care much.

(There’s a whole bunch of things that he can do today, and he makes a mental checklist for it. Things like: grocery shopping, laundry, buying a new bar of soap, little things that he didn’t have the time for over the past month since moving in, but.)

Taiga rolls over and allows the slow morning hours wash him back to a dreamless doze.

It's Sunday, a rare day off so he might as well enjoy it.

—

It’s a half an hour walk, but a ten minute jog in between the fire station and his apartment.

Located in a rather busy but quaint town area, every morning and every night, to and from work, Taiga passes by the supermarket, the convenience store, and the lot of locally owned stores that sell things from trinkets to everyday goods.

It’s a gem in the rock type of place, and Taiga isn’t that rich or that lucky to have landed it in such a short notice, especially since the rent of his last place ate him literally out of meals, and he had to be homeless for a month (well, homeless in Tatsuya's living room.)

It was Seijuurou(-san) who had pulled a few strings and gave Taiga the fresh pick among the houses in the area.

From one bedroom apartments to living complexes with the promise of a private basketball court (since it _was_ one of the Akashi’s many sub-complexes), Taiga chose to be modest and stuck with the cheapest option that he could afford.

Naturally, Seijuurou(-san) seemed a bit miffed at his choice.

After all, Taiga had been part of the fire rescue that put out a fire to one of their sub-complexes, and while the flames were dying down, he had managed to salvage a precious memento of the Akashi’s.

Seijuurou was hell bent on showing his appreciation (in the condescending way that he just does,) even offering to cover some of the rent if Taiga’s pay wasn’t enough.

But really, a whole four bedroom housing with its own basketball court is a bit too much, and so Taiga (even in the face of an intimidating man, with a presence like a lion) politely turned his offer down.

Or as politely as he could anyways.

—

His apartment is nothing impressive.

It's a convenient little space, located on the second floor of a larger apartment complex. When Taiga moved in, it was painfully bare, lacking furniture of any kind aside from the ones already installed and the raggedy beige windows left behind. 

He settled down for the first two weeks with open suitcases dumped near his door, and his clothes, both fresh and dirty, scattered into organized piles along the room walls.

The days' mornings usually began with Taiga rolling awake at five in the morning, back creaking with the stiffness from sleeping on the floor.

He'd shuffle to the kitchen to boil water for his instant food and a cup of cheap coffee. (Tatsuya had gifted him a small kettle, and it sits in the middle of the flaming gas stove, water bubbling, as he saunters his way into the bathroom, still half asleep, and brushes his teeth, sometimes forgetting to put the cap back onto the toothpaste.)

For breakfast, depending if he woke up at five-thirty or five, he'd either stuff tough bread into his mouth or go on the hunt for his stash of ramen, extra spicy because he likes the kick. It helps him wake up.

If he did have the time for ramen, he'd devour around three to four bowls using his unopened box of sports magazines as a table, while sipping his coffee in a cheap paper cup.

He'd listen to the radio on his phone, for the news that day, learning about the new park that's been renovated or what celebrity did what with who.

When the clock on his wall ticks to seven, he'd be out the door, on his way to the station with a backpack of clothes for the next twenty-four hours.

—

A fire fighter’s job, contrary to most belief, isn’t that of a relaxing one with the occasional sirens flaring, alarms blaring.

...well, okay maybe they _sort_ of are, but not at the station where Taiga works at.

It has its strict regulations, specific times that he has to keep up with. After a straight 24-hour shift at the station, Taiga’s let off for the next 72 (only because his station is short handed compared to the bigger districts.)

Work starts strictly at 7:30am and he gets there on the dot, just as chief calls their squad to do the morning check up on their trucks. There’s equipment maintenance, fitness training, drills, what have you.

There’s the occasional call where his squad drapes the yellow coat over their shoulders and dash to the scene on site.

But even then, there’s a lot more vehicle rescues and cleanups then there are actual fires.

There are some big fires, at least three times a year, mostly from firework enthusiasts during the summer festival season and other times from ignorant people leaving their stove on. But Taiga had only personally experienced them at least twenty times in the last few years, some big, most small.

He’s been fine for the most part, got scalded only once when he was a rookie, with a burn scar stretching down the back of his right thigh to teach him a lesson _not_ to disobey orders.

But Taiga had to admit he had been dumb, blinded by smoke and a sense of justice, when he heard false reports of children still inside the building and acted on his own.

He thought he was going to die, trapped under a beam with burning lancing up his thigh—it's been five years since that nightmare.

His chief, his squad, his friends all forced him to therapy sessions and he's been able to cope and he's mostly recovered.

Keyword: mostly.

—

That Sunday morning, Taiga gets up four hours later and instantly regrets not buying a sleeping bag on his last trip to the department store (which was something like many, many weeks ago.)

His back is sore, the bones in his spine pop with weird clicks and his entire body throbs with muscle strain. But the mid-morning creeps along as he hobbles around his apartment, searching for his misplaced cardboard box of ramen.

There’s a sprain in his ankle from having twisted it while on the job, it's not too serious, but it would be really nice if Taiga didn’t have to deal with the occasional painful tug of muscle jolting up his leg.

He had it worse when he over-jumped his limit for the nationals back in the days (and _even worse_ with his leg nearly burned off) and was forced to do physio (and therapy) for a while before he was fully back and functional.

Since then, any kind of leg injury seemed small—supposedly manageable.

But.

It was chief’s orders to take the day off, to see a doctor, and she threatened to have his entire squad man-handle him out the door. And if Taiga didn't behave and _rested_ like a good boy, he'd be under house arrest and babysat like a five year old.

So.

Taiga limps like an old man, cursing quietly to himself while kicking open boxes to find subsistence for the morning.

For breakfast, Taiga decides to spoil himself on something that _isn't_ from the fire station's unlimited stock of dry bread rolls. They're days old and take too much effort to chew without dislocating his jaw. It wouldn't be wrong to assume that they were war rations, or something of the sort.

In the box he manages to find, sits a care package from Tatsuya, given to him over a few weeks ago. Inside is instant miso soup, some canned, pickled vegetables, and a package of powdered protein shake.

(Okay, so it doesn’t sound like the most luxurious meal but that was all Taiga found in his box that wasn't ichiban ramen. He'd like to cook for himself but he doesn't have the time (or even the energy) to shop for groceries, let alone _buy a fridge._

Goodness knows how he's survived this month alone.)

He finishes his meal in five minutes, a bit sad that there isn't more to munch on, but then he remembers texting Tetsuya the night before asking if he'd like to eat at Maji's for lunch and well.

There's no shame in splurging on burgers.

—

The Maji Burgers near Seirin didn’t change much over the years.

Granted, the leather cushions have lost their shine and some have been stabbed in by annoying kids with mechanical pencils, but the burgers haven't changed their unique signature sauce and the tenderness in their beef.

It's been nearly a full month since he last saw his high school friend, but there are things that don't change so quickly.

Tetsuya's sentences are punctuated with the occasional slurp of milkshake, another thing reminiscent from high school days. And he takes calculated sips, calm eyes gazing at Taiga’s mound of burgers stacked like a pyramid on his orange tray.

"I hope you're not starving yourself, Taiga-kun," Tetsuya says, calm in that mother-henning way. "It's not healthy living off ramen and bread...and burgers."

"Yeah," Taiga agrees through a mouthful of food. The taste is ever the same and Taiga chews slowly, relishing it and basking in the air nostalgia of sitting in the booth at the far back of the restaurant. “But I've been busy, no time to unpack or buy anything, you know?"

"It's been a month," Tetsuya kindly reminds him and Taiga shrugs at this, inhaling the burger like he hasn't had breakfast. (Which is true, what he had that morning _hardly_ counted for anything) "...You're also limping."

“I landed badly. Nothing wrong." Taiga folds his wrappers neatly into a tiny square before he grabs another burger. It's lukewarm in his hand, borderline cold.

Another sip and Tetsuya places the milkshake on the table. “Shintarou-kun should be in his office today. You need to have it looked over—”

"It's just a sprain," Taiga stresses, though with his mouth stuffed he doesn't sound convincing. He swallows and smirks at his old friend. "You're doing it again." Tetsuya gives him a look. "The nationals _aren't_ going to happen again, so don't worry."

"I'm not talking about the nationals," Tetsuya sighs, brushing a hand through his shorter, blue hair. And _of course_ , he's not talking about it but Taiga doesn't bother to add to that. 

There are lines under Tetsuya's eyes, creases that come with age, but Taiga thinks it's from the stress of having to deal with children constantly every day. "You're...living alone again and you need to take better care of yourself. You've been getting worse."

 _Worse?_ Taiga wonders as he finishes chewing a bite, fingers greasy as he wipes them down on a napkin. He unwraps the last burger and digs into it, melted cheese oozing and all, "What are you talking about, I've never felt better."

He misses the way Tetsuya glances down, at the folded orange squares, counting eight total, when just a month ago there had been twenty.

—

So, he's _not_ exactly hiding it from Tetsuya, but it's not like Taiga feels like sitting his friend down and talking in circles about the sleepless nights he's been having since he's moved in, and he's _not_ going to go back to therapy to figure out why.

He figures it's an occupation thing; work became more hectic, demanded more from him since they laid off more people, so the pressure is getting to his head.

Taiga can't sleep some nights, and sometimes he can.

But when he does, he wakes with a shout, body drenched in cold sweat and breathes out a sob, a sound stuck deep in his throat, at a dream he can barely remember.

—

"Get out," he says, not turning around. Taiga flinches, hand resting on the knob, he barely even stepped past the door frame.

"I'm not even in your office yet."

"Then get out of the halls," Shintarou says, giving him a look over his shoulder. His bright office lights glare off his rimless glasses and Taiga sticks out his tongue at him.

"I'd love to but it's Tetsuya's orders."

With an effort, he drags himself inside, wincing at his foot, and plops right on the examination table, the brittle roll of paper crinkling loudly under his weight.

Shintarou's office is bright and clean, it's also very white, sore on his eyes and the only sign of color was—well, Shintarou's hair and a bright yellow duck sitting on the side of his desk. (His lucky item, Taiga absently thinks.)

“I keep telling you idiots, I’m not your personal doctor," Shintarou sighs, throwing his clipboard onto his desk with a loud clatter. He says this but he pulls out a pair of white latex gloves from the box on his wall.

“...idiots,” Taiga echoes, and weirdly, the insult doesn’t sting as much as it would have about ten years back. He's become immune to Shintarou's way of addressing friends—or long-time acquaintances. He kicks off his shoe and pulls off his sock. "Just look at it. Tell Tetsuya it's fine, and I'll leave your office, yeah?"

Shintarou doesn't deign to answer but slides his rolling chair close to where Taiga is sitting. One look at the swollen ankle has Shintarou click his tongue and shake his head, “Troublesome. I should charge idiots double the fee.”

“Hey, hey, you know I can't afford that—” Taiga says, before wincing when gloved fingers cradled his foot. Shintarou is frowning, jaw tense—not a good sign.

"When?"

Taiga swallows a bit. "Yesterday."

"Did you ice—"

He tries to wiggle his foot but Shintarou glares at him and he stops, "No fridge, remember?"

"Right, I've forgotten. A homeless man even in your own home," Shintarou lets his foot go and rolls himself back to his table where his clipboard is. He snaps off his gloves, tosses it into the bin that's across the room with one hand (a basketball freak with impeccable aim through and through), and clicks his pen twice.

"Go upstairs for an x-ray, but in the meanwhile, you'll have an ankle brace and crutches. Until I receive the results, rest for the day."

Taiga visibly deflates. "Hey, I need to get back to work or I'm—" He pauses when Shintarou fishes out a phone, his _personal phone_ , and _hits_ speed dial. "...Who are you calling?"

"Someone to make sure you don't run around and do something stupid—" he says calmly, crossing his legs before he looks up at the clock on the opposite wall. "—Good afternoon, this is Shintarou. Do you have time to pick your idiot brother up? Yes, he's got his foot sprained—no, not too severe by the looks of it, but it can get worse."

"You didn't have to call _Tatsuya_ —" Taiga mumbles under his breath as Shintarou's glasses glint in his direction and his polite, doctor smile—a touch irritated.

"Oh, it's not a bother, not at all."

—

Shintarou kicks him out after grumbling about stupid idiots who get their feet sprained and heads smashed in, but Taiga doesn't remember getting a concussion from anything recently so he only thinks that it's another way of Shintarou expressing his weird affection for Taiga's idiocy.

With a splitting pain under his armpits, Taiga uses the crutches to swing himself down the hall, to the elevator, and up to the fifth floor of the hospital to get his foot x-rayed.

It's a hassle, walking with crutches.

It's even _more_ of a hassle having a nurse tail him to _make_ sure he uses it. Mercy would be Shintarou giving him a wheelchair and having the nurse push him down the halls, but Shintarou doesn't do mercy, he's too cruel for that.

Taiga glares down at the tiles, awkwardly rowing himself across the floor, and from the other end of the hall, doesn't hear the distant (polite) yells after a man, dressed in navy blue, who runs past him and into the opposite direction.

—

After a month on his own, Taiga finds himself sprawled on Tatsuya's couch _again_ , because both Tatsuya _and_ Tetsuya (damn them both) had agreed that Taiga's apartment, full of cardboard boxes and heaps of clothes all over, is a hazard of its own.

His foot isn't hurt _too_ badly, he'll recover in a few days, and be ready to jump back to work and run ten miles in a morning if he wanted to, but he received orders from four different people (his boss, his doctor, his brother, his friend) to _rest._

Taiga hates the word, because resting involves sitting around, not doing anything. _Relaxing_ on the other hand is Taiga picking up a ball and playing on the street court, but Tatsuya's hidden away the basketball in his house (Taiga isn't even allowed to _spin_ it, the heck) and banned him from stepping out the door of his house.

There's nothing Taiga can do, so he grabs the remote nearby, and with his leg propped up on the couch with a bag of ice on his foot, he turns on the TV and flips through channels.

—

He's in a room of gray, or at least that's what he's dreaming.

Light gray walls with no windows, no doors, just gray with traces of darker gray running along where the walls meet in corners and angles.

 _"Hey,"_ someone says behind him, it startles him a bit because in all his dreams he's been by himself, or he thinks he's been alone. Taiga peers at it, a nondescript white figure, sitting cross-legged. It's young or sounds young, almost familiar and maybe that's why Taiga walks closer to it instead of away.

_"It's been a while. Sorry for calling out of the blue."_

"Ah," Taiga sits down next to it; the floor is gray. He feels strangely calm sitting next to this blank figure. "I don't mind."

" _You don't know me, or I think you don't know me, but I have a favor to ask."_

"Sure, what is it," Taiga says. The walls start to fracture before he hears a loud buzzer beater and crowds _roar_ in his ear—the dream shatters, and he _plunges._

Taiga jerks, eyes snapping open, a voiceless scream lodged in his throat, feeling like his body had _smashed_ into the sofa.

The TV in front of him is blaring, the Inter-High championship game is over with high school boys in black and red cheering, wearing purple ribbons around their necks and carrying a trophy.

Another dream—a different dream, Taiga tells himself, taking in a breath—holding it—and letting it go slowly. He rests his face on his hand, smoothes back his bangs from his forehead.

From the kitchen, he faintly hears the drone of a voice from Tatsuya's house phone:

_[—a month to move, so I appreciate the help, thanks, Himuro.]_

—it ends with a sharp beep.

—

"Are you sure you're fine?" Tatsuya asks from beside him, a worried hand hovering around the bend of Taiga's elbow while he walks up to his apartment door and _seriously_ , while it's nice that he cares, he's _not_ a baby.

He's _twenty-nine_ for god's sake, and perfectly able to take care of himself.

"It doesn't hurt anymore," Taiga assures him and fishes his lanyard of keys from his jacket pocket. Tatsuya gives him a doubtful look but steps back, elegantly shrugging in a resigned sort of way.

He lingers, eyes concerned as he slides his hands into his pockets."You know I don't mind if you stayed a few more days—"

"I'm all right," Taiga grins, and he unlocks his door.

"Call if you need me."

"...yeah, of course."

—

(Taiga slips, sometimes.

Buys a case of beer, drinks until blue cans scatter the floors in a spiral pattern, until brown cardboard boxes and the red labels melt as a puddle into the hardwood floor, because sometimes, all Taiga wants is to just sleep and forget.

It doesn't work.

Sometimes comfort to him is a warm body pressed flushed against his, nails dragging bright red lines down his back, or hands rough against his sides, and tangled limbs between silk bedsheets of a love hotel. And between the heat of the rush and the deep, bass music thrumming through his veins, he’d forget, just a bit.

But he’d remember it anyways.

The sleepless nights, waking nightmares, crushing fear are all wrapped in licks of flames that should have disintegrated into just a distant memory.

There's that dream again.

The therapist had warned him that it doesn't completely go away, but it'll keep its distance because Taiga had learned how to _handle_ it.

And sometimes, he can.

But there are times, like now, when it's creeping along the shadows of his bedroom walls like a ghost that refuses to let him go, with a whispering echo just kept short from his ear.)

—

There's a bar named _White Trumps_ in central Tokyo where Tatsuya works as a bartender. It's a quiet, quaint place, atmospheric with jazz music playing from speakers hidden in the corners. Soft golden lights drown the dark, oak counter tops and to Taiga this is his second home, where he sits at the bar counter, fingers loosely curling around a glass of water and watching Tatsuya tilt colored bottles into a cocktail shaker.

There's always a reunion every two weeks, when Tatsuya reserves a section of the bar for familiar faces from their high school days.

Taiga doesn't remember everyone, he remembers his upperclassmen but forgets those younger than him. Over a glass of apple juice (Tatsuya is purposely controlling his alcohol intake because of reasons,) Taiga would study faces and listen in to the stories these people share, trying to remember who they are, but he's always had bad memory.

Taiga tries to go as often as he can, but he's been getting sloshed with more work, he's busy.

Really.

"There's been some people wondering where you've been," Tatsuya tells him when, after a long day of work, Taiga chose to head to the bar at three a.m in the morning instead of home. "I think someone misses you. A lot."

"Yeah? I don't do much 'sides just sitting here and listening," Taiga says, tired. He ruffles his hair, it's in knots and tangles.

He lies lazily on top of the wiped counter just as Tatsuya puts something down in front of him, heavy, and Taiga grunts appreciatively at the glass of juice— _not_ juice.

A blue bottled sports drink.

"Since when did you serve these?" The bottle is cold, beads of water collecting along the plastic. It's been so long since he's drank anything besides juice, water, (and also cans of beer.)

"We don't," Tatsuya says and continues wiping wine glasses inside out with a maroon handkerchief. "Someone left it here for you. Said you should come by more often."

"Weird patron you have there," Taiga mumbles, twisting open the cap with a pop.

There's something strange in the way Tatsuya looks at him; it's expectant but also knowing, then there's that weird smile on his lips.

"I suppose."

—

It used to be a habit Taiga had, to pick up his cellphone once he's off work at eleven p.m, and make a quick five minute call to America, to L.A, to the apartment in which he and his girlfriend had live in for his last two years of college.

There was nothing special about the exchange.

Just a simple: _"Hey, how are you_ doing?", a bit about his day, his week, two sentences, maybe some response to what she said to him last, and then a, _"I love you, goodnight."_ spoken in a whisper after the pitched beep of an answering machine.

Almost whenever he'd remember in the night before he sleeps, Taiga also listens to the voicemails she's left behind—a brief message about her day, where she went, and he'd lie back on the mattress of his bed, staring at the ceiling, smiling a bit with fond crinkles around his eyes as her voice bounces around his walls.

Now he just, forgets.

Doesn’t return calls, doesn’t bother to look at the messages written in English.

The phone in his hand just becomes heavier with the thought of needing to talk to her; of needing to maintain whatever it is they had before.

It hasn’t been easy.

It's been years since Taiga had taken the time off to visit America, to visit Alex, his dad, his girlfriend. The last he left was about two years after he came back to Japan, but after the accident—well. He's gotten busy.

He's told them as much.

Taiga's sure that they'd understand and thankfully, they did without any questions. He didn't tell them anything about his leg, about what happened, the therapy he had to do but maybe Tatsuya leaked it to Alex, who in turn told his dad, and.

He never visited again since then.

Being alone was just easier.

Never calling was just easier.

—

His girlfriend did come to Japan recently though, just a few months before Taiga moved out from Tatsuya's condo.

Rich, bleach blonde hair standing out against the crowd of blacks and browns (and his abnormally, weird, weird _red,)_ she was as gentle as he had remembered, and still the ever picky shopaholic.

From America, she brought with her a waft of fancy perfume and several gifts for him, basketball shoes, a black and white photo of Kobe Bryant with a scrawl on top— _"I pulled some strings and got it for you,"_ she had explained—and air of elegance (with a different ring on her finger he’s pretended not to notice.)

Then, on the last day of her visit, when they were eating dinner at one of the fancier restaurants that Taiga has heard recommendations of, she gave him a soft (disconnected) smile, lips glossed a light pink, with her bright blue eyes hidden behind mascara'd lashes.

Her hand enveloped his, gentle and burning at the same time.

 _"You’ve changed,_ " she said, neither smiling or frowning.

He wasn't sure what to make of it so he sipped his glass of water, looking down and away. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Taiga wanted to agree, _Yes, maybe. Just a bit._

But he says nothing but smile, worn creases deepening under his eyes. They ate in silence for the rest of that night, listening to the soft jazz dancing across the lounge accompanied by the soft clinks of wine glasses and forks against porcelain.

—

It was quiet, subdued, carefully chosen words without raw anger. It’s only right that it happened, when she touched his face gently, fingers cold from the winter air, and says, “ _I couldn’t do it anymore, I’m sorry, Taiga. I didn’t know how to tell you.”_

“It’s fine,” he says, grasping her shoulders through her burberry plaid coat. He bends down, hesitates, watches his breath leave in puffs, before he presses his cheek against hers. “You deserve it. To be happy, that’s all.”

It’s only fair. given the distance growing between them, how he’s just simply been running away— _coward_ , he thinks—and she returns to him a ring she had kept for years, safe in a box, and now back into the palm of his hand.

Cheap.

Something he forked out with his college pocket money; years ago, it held a lot of promise, but it now it rings empty to his ears, of vows he’ll never say now but had wanted to say before.

There’s supposed to be something hollow, being carved from his chest. Movies and popular media call it heartbreak, but when she leaves, Taiga just blankly stares after her, counting the number of footsteps she takes before she is swept away behind a crowd.

—

It takes a few days, but Thursday morning, Taiga is back on his feet and gets up very early to a quiet apartment, cold water left in the kettle from last night's ramen, and a haphazard stack of dried styrofoam cups among other cardboard paper shreds in the plastic bag tied to the handle of his oven.

He takes some time, moving around his apartment, picking up stray, used napkins and throwing them into the bag. After an hour, Taiga glances around—at the card board, the mound of pillows with mismatched patterns, and the stack of old basketball magazines he perused through deep into the night.

The apartment doesn't look any less cluttered, and doesn't feel anymore like home.

—

"What is it now?"

Taiga is starting to believe that Shintarou has eyes in the back of his head, or he has some kind of built in radar for "idiots" as he so often fondly calls him.

"I'm just—" Taiga steps around the yellow sign on the floor in front of the door, there's a slippery mess of mud and shoe imprints. He frowns at the floor for a while, before being suddenly aware of Shintarou's dark green energy seeping through the air. "Returning the crutches—"

"There's no need," he says, eyes trained on his laptop as his bandaged fingers click-clacks away at the keyboard. "It's yours to keep for...future blunders you may make."

Taiga contents to setting the crutches against the wall before plopping on the examination table, vaguely surprised that the sheet had already been crinkled and littered with dried mud, just like the floor.

"What happened here?" he asks, staring at the swipes of brown near where his shoes are at.

"Some _idiot_ ," Shintarou hisses, stressing on the word, "stepped in here with dirty boots on just a while ago. I honestly can't believe how I put up with you two."

 _Us two?_ Taiga wonders, looking up at the ceiling for some kind of answer. (There isn't any but tiles lying neatly in rows.)

Shintarou rolls back and carefully avoids running into a stray splatter of mud near the wheels of his chair.

"So."

Taiga feels his eyes, speculative, studying his face and lingering a bit too long at the bags under his eyes. "You're having trouble sleeping again."

It wasn't a question but Taiga shakes his head. He laughs lightly, dredging up air from his lungs. "Nah, I was just reading some old magazines late last night, so—"

Shintarou interrupts him and bats away his explanation with a wave. "Has he called you yet?"

"What?" Taiga blinks just as Shintarou crosses his arms in that annoyingly doctor way and sighs deeply.

"Ah, I suppose not then," Shintarou mumbles to himself, a strange quirk in his lips as he ducks his head as if he was thinking. Taiga lets him grumble some other things under his breath, choosing not to think about it, and instead stares at the basketball jersey-wearing teddy bear on his desk.

Another one of Ohasa's odd predictions, Taiga guesses.

"Anyways, would you like a prescription? To help with your sleep." He hears Shintarou clicking his pen and grabbing at the notepad.

Taiga's attention snaps back at him, at the leering glare from his glasses and he feels a worn laughter bubble from his chest. "Ah, no, it's fine. I have to get back to the station right now, so maybe not."

Shintarou looks doubftul, but he drops the pad and pen back onto his desk and returns to his laptop. "Take care."

"I will," Taiga says, just from the door, with a wide grin that doesn't touch the corner of his eyes.

He leaves without picking up the crutches, leaning on the wall near the door.

—

On his way back to the station, Taiga wanders somewhere close to a convenience store. His stomach demands for food and so with an aching pain in his gut, he thinks that maybe once, he'll spoil himself for lunch.

He buys something small, like a light snack to him almost—teriyaki grilled chicken spread over rice seasoned with furikake. To the rack next to the heating box filled with warm bentos are a stack of sports magazines, Basketball monthly.

This month, the Touou team is featured with interviews inside on their latest victory at the Inter High. He runs a thumb against the ridges of the magazine, thinking about picking it up and just reading it like that high school student he once was but—

The time on his watch says 1:34pm and he's overstayed his break, so he rushes out there with a bag slung around his arm and jogs back to the station.

—

The jingle from an unknown number in his pocket comes out from nowhere.

(After all, he has assigned everyone he knows a different ringtone; and he only really knows his old Seirin teammates, Shintarou, Tatsuya, and Tetsuya.)

Unknown numbers were either from overly enthusiastic marketing folks trying to sell him the latest kitchen ware or always the elderly who hit the wrong number. (He can't forget the one time, an old lady took it in a stride, assumed Taiga was someone named "Hiro" and rambled about a girl she wanted him to meet.)

So, when his cellphone rings at three in the afternoon of a normal Thursday while he was sweeping the floors of the station, Taiga ignores it.

—

Five more missed calls all from the same number in one afternoon.

Taiga thinks, once the number hits ten, he's going to call the police on the guy for harassment.

(Seventh ring and then it stops when Taiga is sitting in the backseat of the truck with his squad, on their way back from having to put out a flaming barbecue grill that had too much coals and logs for the old man to handle.)

—

_"Taiga?"_

"What's up, Tatsuya?" he asks in between his gulpful of dinner in the lunchroom. (Nothing special either because it's Minoru that made it. The third female in his squad and probably the second-best cook next to Taiga; she makes simple dinners—keeping in mind the portion of meat, vegetable, and carbohydrates—and arranges them neatly in their meal trays.)

He hears an odd silence and some background murmuring from the other side.

"Er, something wrong?"

_"Oh—no. I was just wondering."_

Taiga settles his fork against the piece of chicken and pushes it around the plate and into the pickled vegetables sitting in a pile on the side. He watches it topple. "Wondering what?"

A light, dismissive laugh. That's weird. It's always weird when Tatsuya laughs like that, like there's a secret he's keeping and Taiga is too _baby_ to be told what it is. _"Nothing, nothing. I have to get back to work."_

The line dies before he calls him out on it.

—

Eighth call and Taiga thinks he should pick up just to give the telemarketing man (or old lady) a piece of his mind to stop dialing his number because it's _fucking irritating._

He answers, cradling his phone between his shoulder and his ear while tying the laces of his boot, methodically crossing strings and making sure the lengths were even. He thinks of the things he can say; between cuss words and polite demands to just stop, he opts for a careful insult—

“ _...fuck, Kagami, answer your phone— oh. Uh. Hello?”_

The familiar voice with the very familiar, obnoxious tone strikes a nerve that he thought he’s buried ten years ago, and his heart tightens just a bit because he's thought— _he thought._

“...The fuck?”

There’s a snort on the other side and he’s _sure_ now that there’s only one person who could even make a sound like that. But Taiga finishes the knot of the laces on his boot cleanly before he takes a glance at his phone in hopes of seeing a familiar number or a name.

_Unknown number._

The same number that dialed all the other million times.

Taiga stares at the lockers of the fire department’s changing room; they're rusty, old things. (Clearly, the budget shows in the state of their equipment.) And he's thinking, trying to come up with the answers to how and why, but mostly _why._

“ _So...”_

The silence in the room is as blaring as the pause from his phone and Taiga breathes deeply, racking his brain and trying to remember how he’s been so _angry_ but.

But he’s mellowed out over the years, his temperament has finally caught up with his age, and he doesn’t even remember why he had been angry at _him_ of all people—so, all Taiga manages is a deflating sigh. “What?”

“ _No, I just. I called you. A lot. Thought the number was wrong when you never answered,”_ he laughs, voice tired and frayed, and that for a second surprises him. Taiga knows it’s been ten years, but has he always sounded like that?

What happened to big-ego and pompous conceitedness?

The thought jostles some old memories (basketball, high school, stuff from a decade ago) that Taiga just can’t help but frown at. It’s always been slightly bittersweet, memories he's locked away and hated to think back on. _“You know it's been a while, so. I didn’t know you were still around.”_

“Yeah?” Taiga shuts his eyes and he can imagine that cocky smirk on a stupid eighteen year old kid who had always thought it was him against the rest of the world. “Well, I’m not dead, you bastard.”

“ _Hah, well I didn't know._ ”

Taiga heaves a sigh, he's tired and it's the end of a long work day. But there's a thrum of energy pulsing in his veins, when he’s bantering like this with an old friend— _not friend._

Taiga makes sure to keep his voice low and leveled, calm, casual. “So, what do you want, Aomine? I have a debriefing soon.”

There’s something weird (and weirdly pleasant) in saying Aomine’s name again, the name feels strange on his tongue, he hasn't spoken it since _forever_ and it's odd, but a bit sweet, and—Taiga doesn’t try to think further into it.

_"I heard from Shin that you moved somewhere in Shiba?”_

_Shin?_

Who the hell is _Shin?_

“Uh, yeah...? What of it?” Taiga glances at his wrist watch. He has a meeting in three minutes, and in the last meeting, when he stumbled in two minutes late, the chief chewed him out thoroughly.

He has three minutes to get there and it’d take him two minutes and a half if he sprints (that is if he manages to dodge any obstacles and potential casualties.)

“Thirty seconds, what do you want.”

“ _I...need a place to crash,”_ Aomine says, breathy and low. The laugh is gone from his voice and Taiga hears him swallow thickly. _“I've been asking around; Tetsu suggested I call you.”_

Ah, that too—the nickname—sounded so nostalgic and strange.

Taiga blinks slowly and he can't believe he only has two minutes before he has to bolt. “...Is that all?”

“ _Yeah. Sort of.”_

Taiga stands from the bench and heads straight to the door with brisk and heavy steps. “Sure. Ask Tetsuya for the address, I got to go.”

“ _Tetsuya—?”_ There’s a brief pause, a would-be-awkward moment if Aomine didn't cough half a second later. _“Cool, I’ll be there tonight then. Thanks.”_

Taiga half-nods before the flat tone erupts from his phone, and by then, he has the phone jammed into his back pocket and his feet carrying him swiftly down the halls.

(Taiga doesn’t mean to, but he kind of forgets about the phone call once he blasts through the door of the meeting room, nearly smashing his coworker in the face with the slab of wood.

But he makes it on time anyways, and that's what matters the most, even if his breath is knocked from his lungs.

The debriefing isn’t anything new.

They reviewed the incident earlier that day, old man barbecuing, who suddenly had a raging inferno in place of his grill.

Everyone followed the procedures in the thick instruction textbook that they had religiously studied, and so Taiga’s mind wanders off wondering if he can make a dash to the convenience store that night for provisions for the next few days.)

—

It's later when Taiga jogs home with his backpack strapped across his chest and instant ramen and packages of powdered miso soup slung in plastic bag around his arms, that the thought hits him like a freight train and runs him over, ten wheels and counting.

 _Aomine Daiki_ called him.

That asshole from a decade ago _called him._

Taiga nearly smashes head first into a metal pole on the side of the road.

The almost-concussion and swarm of questions force him to stagger (quite dumbly) to a bench. His groceries nearly topple over once he places them down.

Come to think of it, why the hell did he call?

If he knew Tetsuya's number, why didn't he crash at his place instead? (Okay, well maybe the fact that Tetsuya lives almost on the other side of Tokyo might answer that, but—wait no, it still makes no sense _._ )

And here's another problem.

_Why the fuck did Taiga agree?_

He sits for a while, finding solace in the sounds of the summer night: the buzz of cicadas, the steady hum of electricity from the street lamps, and the weird, hobbling drunk businessman making his way down the quiet park path.

Then again, on second thought, it’s only _Aomine Daiki_ and what damage can he do?

It can't be worse than having Alex waltzing into his apartment, stark naked and dripping shower water all over his floorboards.

Besides, it's normal for the guy.

Calling after ten years of radio silence and just rudely asking out of the blue that he move into his apartment—it’s only something that _he_ can pull off.

Taiga leans back against the wooden bench, looks up at the sky—at the pretty twinkly stars—and takes a deep breath.

Not a problem.

Just act like normal, Taiga.

Act like normal.

—

Turns out he can't, so he ends up pacing back and forth in front of the same bench he sat on five minutes ago, palms sweaty and _thinking_ of ways to get the hell out of this situation because ditching his house right now wouldn't do anything but leave Taiga homeless for the night and Aomine—camping outside his door.

And Taiga doesn't really know what he'd do with that.

—

“Tetsuya,” he growls out, teeth and all when he has his phone clenched between his fingers. “Please help me.”

Actually, Tetsuya _needs_ to help him because he told—he _told Aomine_ to call him, and if that isn't Tetsuya's fault, then the blame falls entirely on Shin.

(Whoever the hell this _Shin_ is.)

“ _What is it, Taiga-kun?”_ He sounds sleepy and somewhat irritated; there's an implied _this better be important_ in the way Tetsuya grumbles under his breath. _“You realize I have a field trip tomorrow.”_

Taiga does a double-take and looks at his watch. It’s past one in the morning; oops. He _swears_ he left the station at eleven.

“Uh, yes,” Taiga chews the inside of his cheek, and debates whether he should spill the entire story now, or— “Do...you want to have dinner at Maji’s?”

So he prays that maybe Tetsuya would say _yes_ , and that _maybe_ he'd also let him stay at his house that night so Taiga could sit back and re-evaluate the consequences in letting that guy back into his life.

(Besides, he really doesn't want to return to the station and coop up in the shared sleeping quarters worrying himself over something _so stupid_.)

“ _Taiga-kun.”_ It's a soft sigh, but no less impatient. _“Are you insane.”_

“It’s a 24/7 restaurant?” he adds, hopeful. "For good time's sake—"

“ _Good night, Taiga-kun.”_

The line goes dead and Taiga pulls the phone away, whimpering at the call end screen.

He _really_ doesn’t want to go home.

—

"Tatsu—"

_"I'm staying with Atsushi tonight, please head home and rest. Don't even think about camping at the bar. I told my co-workers to force you out if they see you."_

He hears the deafening beep before he could say another word, and that was the end of that. For the last fifteen minutes, Taiga hasn't moved, at all. From the bench.

That drunk businessman from earlier had collapsed next to his bags of food, blubbering about things like his wife, among other things.

—

During the walk home, Taiga has thought up about ten ways to greet the former Touou Ace, and after repeating them twice or thrice in his head, none of them sound reasonable.

“ _Yo,”_ would sound too brisque and over friendly, and Taiga for the life of him only remembers glaring at Aomine for a big majority of their high school days.

They used to be rivals, aces of sworn enemy teams, so— _maybe_ something rude would fit better, just a homage to the good old days. (Which, on second thought, Taiga really doubts existed.)

Which—on third thought, _also_ seems too over friendly considering the ten or so years of living a normal life without the thought of Aomine crossing his brain. (Actually, it's not a stretch for Taiga to have assumed Aomine just _gone_ , probably having been run over by some car or whisked away to some distant land somewhere in the horizon.)

“ _So why the hell are you here?”_ would have sounded the most plausible, if the most obvious answer wasn’t: _“I need a place to crash.”_

In the end, Taiga gives up and decides to just show up.

(In the twenty minute walk back home, he thinks up the various disasters that could happen before he reaches the door: a plane falling out of a sky, a meteor striking him in the head, some emergency call from the station asking him to head back—

Taiga _doesn't_ think about Aomine—those blue eyes, that cocky grin, that scoff and odd twitch at the corner of his lips—he thinks of anything but _that_.)

—

Taiga isn't running away, honest to god, he _isn't_.

It's just that some guy he knew for some few years had decided to corner him months before he packed up and headed to L.A for college and told him something—weird.

 _"I—see you more than a friend, and I think—”_ Aomine faltered on his words before he gave up and let go. He laughed, pulling away like it was some elaborate joke he had planned all along—the hugging, his embrace something close to desperate. _"—never mind. I was kidding, just forget I said anything."_

 _Coward_ , Taiga had wanted to say but didn't, and the remaining days passed by like how they usually did. He let the memory bury itself over time, under dwindling basketball one-on-one's and outings at Maji Burgers.

So it's not startling when somewhere along the months, their meetings trickled close to none, and they brushed each other off with flimsy _"I'm busy"s_ and _"There's something I have to do_ "s. It became so regular that Taiga almost missed the forced smiles and distant gaze, ignoring the gut feeling that something had obviously changed.

He tries to forget about it.

Because forgetting is easier than thinking. At least, that was what experience had taught Taiga to believe.

Last day in Japan.

At the terminal, Taiga has his bags packed, a duffle with some heavy jackets and snacks, and two checked suitcases filled to the brim with gifts from his teammates and his measly selection of black clothes. In another bag, a smaller suitcase, he brings his worn jerseys and some tournament medals for sentimentality.

There was a huge crowd of people at the terminal seeing him off. His teammates, rival teams who had come to recognize his basketball, some underclassmen of his who he had inspired to join the team. They were all there—or if they weren't, they had made the point to see him the week before or wished him well with small gifts and text messages.

Familiar faces, all around him, except one.

Aomine.

He never came.

Nothing came from him after that. Messages, phone calls, the like, though perhaps it's only because Taiga received a new phone in America, and sequentially—a new life.

(He can't help it.

For the first three months, Taiga thinks and thinks. Somewhere near the end of the school semester—he stops thinking.

In the end, Taiga figured that it was best to forget it all.)

—

Taiga climbs the concrete steps leading up to the unit that he lives in, feet heavy as led as one boot sidles up next to the other. He's counting the steps, every metre left before he reaches the door, and the weight on his shoulders sag him down. His breath feels heavier, quicker.

He stalks towards the turn of the corner, knowing full well that right around the bend, his door is right there, half-flickering door lamp and all. Taiga treads carefully, quietly, but his clothes rustle loudly anyways, and he’s nervous with a stiff jaw and voice hitched deep in his throat.

And he's sure if he speaks now, it'll _crack—_

This is ridiculous, Taiga thinks after a long draw of breath. He _shouldn’t_ be nervous about seeing a familiar face again, even after so many years.

It's just a person. Just another person.

It's _only_ Aomine Daiki.

Taiga takes a deep breath and unleashes it all in one breathe— “Yo, sorry I'm late—”

Taiga twists around the corner and startles into a silence when he sees piles of boxes and two large suitcases stacked neatly against his door. A small potted (withering) plant adds a touch of green to all this mess. And a stray basketball loiters about, glowing a vibrant orange in the soft yellow light hanging above the door frame.

But Aomine isn't there.

When Taiga stumbles closer, he spots a piece of notebook paper jammed under the flaps of one of the boxes, messy handwriting, barely legible only if he squints.

_Emergency. Move my stuff in, will you?_

With a growl, Taiga crushes the note and flicks it to the floor, next to the well-worn ball. He sneaks his spare key where he had found the note, and thinks maybe he should write a response for the idiot to move his own stuff in, but decides against it when he realized he didn't have anything to write with.

In any case, if Aomine thinks he’ll move his shit in for him (after all the big, fat _nothing_ he's done for him for the past ten years,) he’s wrong.

—

Taiga tries to get a good sleep, some shut-eye from the tiring day he had, but he can’t help but expect to hear half-murmurs and the phantom click of the door unlocking in the middle of the night.

(He dreams and then he doesn't; Taiga weaves in and out of sleep, staring up at the ceiling at times and the faint light he left on in the kitchen.

The light turns yellow and then gray sometimes, and he's left staring at the long shadows cast by the door, searching for some kind of answer.)

5:10 am rolls by, he wakes up, back scorching from the summer heat.

The boxes are still outside, the key still tucked safely under the cardboard flap.

Aomine is nowhere to be seen that day and the day after.

—

This isn't one of his dreams.

Reality bleeds in slowly, trickling from the golden glow on the white walls to the steady beep of a heart rate monitor, from the tube passing down his throat to the paper thin sheets that itches on his skin.

He hears voices, unfamiliar and familiar ones, but only catches words— _skin graft, morphine, doing all right_ —

There's a haze between his eyes, a numbing nothingness, and he closes his eyes against the creeping pain, the lingering heat on his thigh.

Taiga blinks, the world's gone gray. Once again, and now it's orange.

Drugged up on milliliters of morphine, Taiga faintly hears the chorus of distinct voices and the blurred shadows behind the hospital curtain.

He recognizes Tatsuya, first and foremost, the gentle thrum in his tone as he talks to Atsushi in a hushed whisper, asking, _who's turn is it for the night?_ In which Atsushi answers, _Furihata, I think._

Taiga blinks and the curtains are drawn, the room is dark. Above the rumble of the air conditioner, he hears Tetsuya, Junpei, and Riko speaking in low tones near the door. _We need to watch him after this, Taiga-kun is...well, he's stubborn._

Blink once again, and he wakes with a start, breath pounded from his lungs, and his leg hurts. As if on cue, there's a faceless nurse by the bedside, dressed in stark white, increasing the dosage with a couple of beeps.

Taiga doesn't realize there are tears in his eyes from the relief, but he closes them, breathing evenly, waiting to slip away into timeless sleep.

Not halfway there, he hears hesitant taps of hard shoes against the tiles, then feels fingers press firmly against his pulse, counting five seconds before there's a hand on his wrist, gripping and warm.

"You look like shit.” A choked laugh, barely audible, then a deep breath as the chair near the bed scrapes back as it's pulled.

And whoever it is sits down, chair creaking as he leans forward, and doesn't say anything after that.

—

Tuesday morning, Taiga oversleeps and wakes up at 6:40.

He grabs a piece of bread during his mad dash out of the apartment, (weaves around the boxes still lying outside), down the stairs (without an ounce of pain or hint of sprain since it's been _weeks_ since that), and to the station.

He gets there in the nick of time, only to have Akiba and Tsuyoshi catch him by the arms and sling him back out the door.

Taiga stumbles backwards, landing hard on his back against the concrete with a loud English _“What the fuck—?”_ flying from his mouth.

"You're off duty today," Akiba says, through the crack of the door when Taiga tries to force his way in, first by his boot and next with his fingers clasping around the frame. "We asked the chief to let you go—"

"I don't have that sprain anymore, god," Taiga gruffly says, sticking his leg further in and trying to squeeze into the building. A few days ago, it had been funny when they barred him from getting to work with the same excuse as they had.

Now, it's just damn annoying, he has rent to pay and food to buy. (Although, they were mostly instant foods and protein shakes.)

"Kagami-san, we know your leg is healed but." Tsuyoshi tries to reason from somewhere behind Akiba. He's always the peacemaker in the squad and a voice of reason, somewhat similar to Kouki back in Seirin days.

Taiga stops trying to squeeze into the ten-inch gap he's created with his shoulder, and hears the rest of his brittle excuse. "You haven't been sleeping well and we're just worried. Even chief said you should head home—"

He gives up and steps out, hearing a whoop of victory behind it as the door shuts.

A beat passes, and it locks shut. _Twice._

—

Taiga finds himself walking around aimlessly around the neighborhood for the next hour, not knowing what to do with himself now that he's been forced away.

Sleep is out of the question. So is, grocery shopping.

The neighborhood is quaint, paved roads wide, padded with some concrete and dirt, old fences with ivy leaves weaved in between and climbing onto tree branches hanging overhead. There are groups of young children, running along the side and avoiding the occasional cars and bikes, clenching onto melting popsicle sticks in the hot, bristling summer.

"Race you to the courts!" he hears someone yell from behind. A boy runs past him, dribbling a tanned ball against the floor and chasing after it jets far ahead of him.

"Not fair, you cheated!" Another yelled, breathless, only running past Taiga now, and not sparing him a second glance.

(A different voice in a different place, a different person, in a time too long ago, "Let's play basketball—")

Taiga startles, suddenly reminded that there was one thing he had meant to do.

—

"Daiki-kun? Ah, yes, he had asked about finding a place to stay, close to town," Tetsuya says slowly and Taiga chokes on his juice because Aomine used to be _Aomine-kun_ , and Taiga isn’t sure when Tetsuya started using _Daiki_.

(Well, okay. Everyone grew up, grew closer, became friends, and sure, Tetsuya is on first name basis with _everyone_ but— _Daiki_...? He didn’t count. It sounds so _wrong_.)

“You should've—" A screeching toddler runs by, screaming bloody murder as another one chases through the soft grass. Taiga tries to hide his flinch, until the shrieking kid is a bit ways off. "You should've at least _said_ something—"

"Would you have refused?" Tetsuya asks, lips curved in that quiet, knowing way as he leans back against the playground picket fence. Now that's a question. Would Taiga have turned Aomine away?

"I—well, not the point," Taiga mumbles, reaching a hand to scratch at his head. _Heart of gold,_ that's what Tetsuya had said about him a few years ago. "It would've helped if I expected it. Think how I felt when some—some _asshole_ calls after ten years, can you believe it? Did you—"

Tetsuya coughs quietly just to the side, and Taiga stares at him. The pieces are slowly fitting together—okay, okay _._ He knows he's not the brightest person, but. _But?_

"...No way. You kept in contact."

Taiga watches him pick at the peeling paint off the white fence. There's an amused expression somewhere in that blank, avoiding gaze. "Tatsuya-san also—"

"Even _Tatsuya_? Why the fuck—" Taiga half-yells just as Tetsuya gives a pointed look as a toddler curiously glances at him. Taiga lowers his voice into a coarse whisper, and takes a step away from the kid. "Oh, that's great. So everyone knew this guy was still alive, except me. Why did no one tell me?"

“Well, yes. He's alive, but it was only recently when we got in touch again," Tetsuya says calmly, despite Taiga almost blowing a fuse and turning beet red, almost crushing the box of juice in his grip. "And we did try, it was just that you two were sort of... _missing_ each other.”

 _Missing each other?_ Taiga mouths wordlessly, still gaping at Tetsuya like he's grown another head. (And Taiga would have probably _liked_ to believe that he did; anything at this point is better than the _things_ Tetsuya is saying.)

Tetsuya breathes in deeply, crossing his arms over that dumb, colorful apron stained with paint and blue smears of fingerprints. "Daiki-kun meant to ask you in person, I think. But you stopped coming to the reunions."

He inhales a deep breath, trying to sort the coil of different emotions in the pit of his stomach—anger, betrayal, but mostly dread. (He's _not_ running, he just doesn't want to _think_ —)

"...I was busy," Taiga says carefully, and they both know it's just another lie, an excuse. But he doesn't need Tetsuya to point that out, so he quickly adds, "...in any case, why ask me? We weren't close."

“Yes, well." Tetsuya shrugs, whimsical, before he turns to leave. Playtime is over now. "Please see to it that it’s fixed soon, Taiga-kun."

—

Days in summer are longer and the nights are humid beyond belief, so Taiga returns home with a sticky layer over his skin and some shopping bags of fruity soap (on sale, buy 2 get 2 free!), towels, and some other things he’s just nabbed based on his fancy.

He’s not the happiest camper, after being booted away from a paying job and _especially_ after hearing from Tetsuya that everyone (except Taiga) _knew_ about Aomine looking for a place to stay. But shopping and finding sales had always been a successful distraction so Taiga feels generous and lets Tetsuya and Tatsuya live for another day.

As he stands at the intersection, waiting for the busy traffic to slow to a stop, Taiga whistles to some tune he had heard over the department store stereos before there’s an entirely _different_ kind of whistling cutting through the thick crowd of cars.

It’s quite the common occurrence, seeing police cars whirring about. No place is a saint, and Taiga has walked by too many dark, shady alleys and backways peppered with people, the lingering smell of smoke, and clink of beer bottles.

He doesn’t think about the police car, and continues to wonder what the next verse to the pop song was, as the little man pops up on the street cross signal and he takes a step onto the black and white bands.

—

Twenty or so minutes later, Taiga comes home to this:

The soft beige walls of his apartment complex is now bathed in a flicker of red lights, and when he walks closer, there’s a police car and a police motorbike, parked in the front. A cop is there, standing in front the open car door, talking and saying something to someone inside—

When Taiga reaches the top of the staircase, he sees another, knocking sharp taps on—is that _his_ door?

(Shit, did he break the law or something? Taiga begins considering all the things he’s done that would have warranted a visit from their black and blue clad friends; _great_ friends, the TFD and TMPD are.)

Taiga clears his voice and adjusts the plastic bags strung about his arm. “Er...can I help you?”

The cop stops and takes a long look at him. There’s something about policemen and wearing sunglasses in the near dark that Taiga will _never_ understand, but it’s unnerving, being gazed at behind shaded lenses.

"You're Kagami Taiga, right?”

The conversation sounds familiar somewhat. (A different voice, a different person in a time too long ago.) Taiga nods carefully. "Um, yes, what can I do for you, officer?"

Only then does the man shove his shades up with a thumb, revealing black, gleaming eyes. Without the glasses, Taiga can see an apologetic dip in his eyebrow. "Well, actually—"

A sharp clang against the metal railings behind him interrupts them before he hears a low growl and a curse, with dragging footsteps sidling up the steps.

"I said I'm fine, god damn it, _stop holding onto me—_ "

A familiar voice and Taiga freezes, chest tightening.

(A different voice in a different place, the same person, " _—never mind. I was kidding, just forget I said anything._ ")

Oh.

Taiga _thinks_ everything, suddenly all at once— _fucking coward, he could’ve asked Kuroko for my number here, why hasn’t he called, did he go off to play in the J leagues or something? It’s fucking boring here, I want to play basketball again—_ as the shoes just scrapes closer and closer, and it stops right beside him.

“—leave a bike though, I’ll meet you guys later,” the voice says and it’s much smoother and lower in person than over the phone.

 _(I wonder how he’s doing, what the fuck is he doing over there? H_ e almost asked Kuroko, over a skype video on an American winter day, but ended up swallowing the words, the anger, _the thinking._ )

Taiga faintly hears the police officers mumble something like a farewell before they disappear down the stairs. Car doors slam before the police car revs up and exits into the street.

“...wow, I know I’ve been gone for a few days, but at least take Mr. Leaf inside, don’t you have a heart?”

(—he had thought they were playing an undeclared game of chicken, first to contact is the first to lose, and Taiga wasn't going to salvage this thing—whatever this _thing_ was between them— _because—_ )

A fan of fingers whisk in front of his face and he blinks, startled. “Uh, earth to Kagami? Are you alive over there?”

It’s out of reflex that Taiga raises a hand and brushes the arm away quickly, and with that motion, he hears Aomine take a quick step back, arms up to cover himself from the barrage of plastic bags strung on Taiga’s arms. “...Uhm. Kagami?”

Taiga blinks and the first thing he sees is a set of very blue (very familiar) eyes peering at him, confused, and a bright red scrape on his cheekbones with a growing swell on the side of his face—

Taiga blanches.

“...what the fuck happened to your face?”

—

The silence between them is deafening as Taiga lets him in, more on principle because half of his face is bashed in, than actually welcoming him in.

"Stay put," Taiga tells him after throwing his bags of towels on the floor near the door. Without glancing back, he walks to the bathroom, remembering that he had stowed his first aid kid in the second drawer upon moving in.

"Cosy," Aomine says loudly when Taiga comes back, box half opened and digging through it as he walks. Aomine glances around, at the cardboard boxes, the scattered pillows, and Taiga hears him snort when his eyes linger on the basketball magazines stacked like the Tower of Pisa on the makeshift table.

He ignores his comment and walks into the kitchen. Cotton pads, swabs, tweezers and a bottle of isopropyl, he sets these all in a neat row on the countertop, as he sighs loudly, "Okay. So what happened. Don't tell me you got into a bar fight or something."

"It's nothing like that," Aomine says and gingerly touches his jaw and winces. He unscrews the cap of isopropyl and soaks a cotton ball with it. "I was working."

Taiga raises a brow at him and watches him click at the tweezers before picking up the cotton ball between the two metal prongs. Aomine is dressed in something akin to street wear, a loose t-shirt with wild (and provocative) images on them and basketball shorts.

"...Right, work," he says doubtfully. "With those clothes..."

Aomine catches onto his tone right away, and offers a laugh before dabbing at his cheek, at a spot where the scrape was _not_ on, "Hey, it was an undercover thing."

 _Undercover thing?_ Taiga doesn't even try to understand what he means by that. Instead, Taiga leans back against the counter and watches Aomine dab at his face a few more times, _not_ at his cheekbone.

"You're missing it."

"Missing what?"

"Give me that," Taiga says with a loud, exasperated sigh before he snatches the tweezers away. With a thin frown, he grabs Aomine's chin with his other hand to steady him.

"I can do it myself—"

"Yeah, right." Taiga presses the cotton ball gently against his cheek and Aomine jerks at that, face scrunching up into a frown—

_"Fuck—"_

"Yeah, stop moving."

There's a lot more scrapes on his face now that Taiga has a closer look at it, some tiny pebbles and bloody skin peeling on the side.

Ten years can definitely change a person though—Aomine has definitely lost that bit of stubborn, baby fat that had clung to his cheeks, and the angles in his jaw are sharper with a shadow of a stubble making its way down to his chin. There are visible lines under his eyes, defined bags, and faint, lasting creases above his brow.

But there's the same crooked grin and deep chuckle, when he says,"I didn't voluntarily scrape my face against a concrete floor, if that's what you're wondering."

"Which means you _did_ scrape your face against the ground," Taiga bites back easily, and tosses the cotton pad into the trash bag tied to the oven.

He lets go of Aomine's chin, faintly feeling the stubble graze against the pad of his fingers, and turns back to the box, to look for band aids.

"...You didn't move my stuff in. The least you could’ve done was water my plant," Aomine idly comments just as Taiga peels away the plastic on the bandage. Taiga feels his fingers tightening on the band-aid as a thread of annoyance climbs up his spine.

"...Your plant was on the brink of death and I’m too busy to care for it," Taiga simply says after a forced breath.

(It's a convenient lie he's always fallen back on, an excuse that Tetsuya and Tatsuya can easily see through, but Aomine—he barely knows anything about him, so—)

"Swamped with work and the like."

Taiga stares at the bright pink scrape on Aomine's cheek, and carefully layers the band-aid on. (He doesn't notice the closing distance between them and how Aomine's breath hitches, all the muscles in his body just _freezing_.)

Taiga drifts away, brushing his hands together. "All right, that's done."

"Erm, thanks," Aomine says slowly, subconsciously reaching a hand to the back of his neck, eyes averting and looking away.

(He used to do that all the time—back in the days, whenever Taiga had helped him washed his laundry from the night before, lent him towels and extra clothes despite Aomine’s vehement protests, had decided to do the dishes instead because Aomine was an _absolute nightmare_ left in the kitchen.

And _isn't it surprising_ that Taiga can remember all of this. Even though it's been years, literally _a decade_ since they've last seen each together, the memories locked away in a box in the corner of his mind that he just didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to _think_ about—)

"I'll—" Aomine says first, interrupting his thought. Taiga blinks out of his stupor and realizes that he had been _staring_. "...start moving my stuff in, if you don't mind."

"Ah, right...Right," Taiga mumbles, blinking quickly and catching himself with a cough. He watches Aomine stiffly walk back out the door, where there are boxes and boxes of his things just piled high up next to the door.

A few seconds later, he comes back in, the wide boxes in his arms tall enough to nearly cover his face.

Taiga has to admit, a small part of him feels bad that he's left Aomine's belongings outside, left to the humid, summer air and such.

But for a majority of the _other_ part—

"By the way, I've been wondering. _When_ did you move in here again?"

—Taiga wants to punch him in the face for all this frankness and his intrusion, but seeing how Aomine's face is already smashed in, he doesn't.

—

Taiga regrets letting him into his apartment because once he does, Aomine is stalking around like a stray cat surveying its new surroundings, stepping over disorganized and open boxes with something like a long judging silence.

"I'm giving you a week," Taiga says, arms crossed as he watches Aomine shift some of Taiga's boxes over to make room for his. With the addition of more things in his living room and another six-foot-some tall guy, the once spacious condo is starting to look...not so spacious.

"Just one week and that's it, I'm kicking you out."

“That's not enough time," Aomine says as he carefully stacks boxes upon another, sometimes pausing to peek into the mess of clothes jammed in the space between instant ramen bowls. Taiga doesn't even have it in him to get embarrassed about that anymore.

Aomine throws a glance over his shoulder. "Look, I’ll pay half the rent. Just let me crash until I can find another place.”

Taiga reconsiders, but only because it'd be nice to not have to worry about bills. It's been taxing on him lately, having to juggle his finances with rent and food lately. (Even though his food has been meager and unhealthy at best.)

"Fine, just don't stay too long."

And like that, Aomine grins like the smug idiot he is, and starts to drag his belongings (a large duffle bag and two huge suitcases full of clothes, probably) to Taiga's room.

Taiga follows him, only to find Aomine stopped at the doorway, staring at _more_ cardboard boxes and some pillows and cushions thrown on the floor.

Taiga would've been a bit embarrassed at the display if it was someone else visiting his house, but it's _Aomine_.

No reservations needed for him _at all._

“Kagami...the hell is your bed?”

Especially when he's such a rude piece of shit.

“Like I said, I just moved in, so I didn't have time to buy furniture,” Taiga growls as he steps around a strewn shirt on the floor. He picks up a white sock, almost beige from an unwashable stain, and flicks it into the clean pile of laundry he hasn't gotten to folding yet.

"Keep your stuff somewhere else."

And he shoves aside Aomine's suitcases and punts his duffle bag right across the room, ignoring the dismayed squawk behind him.

—

All right. So here's the thing.

Taiga—isn't bitter, all right?

He's not bitter, he's not angry, it's been _ten years._ He's let those things pass, buried it far in the corners of his mind, (and subconsciously vowed to himself never to become close, that vulnerable, that _whatever the hell it is_ with another person ever again.)

But it's a funny thing, hope is. Perching on your shoulder and just whispering sweet promises even when it's been three months and counting.

Six months, seven, eight, two years, five, eight—ten.

He's not angry. He's not, but.

It's a cesspool of raw emotions and incoherent thoughts; it hurts to think about it, becomes a pounding beat between his brows and a clenching tightness in his chest.

He doesn't understand it.

Taiga sprawls over his much-used, makeshift table, arms cushioning his head as he struggles to breathe, to get the weight off his chest. He's exhausted, it’s too much today, too much things happening today.

He counts sheep, losing his place sometime after thirty, and starts again—and then again, until his consciousness blurs and he’s stuck in some kind of limbo between twenty-eight and twenty-nine, kept on repeat like a broken record droning in his head.

(Nine in the evening, Taiga doesn’t hear the creak of the weak floorboards under Aomine’s weight, as he trods from the bathroom, dripping water and warm puffs of air from his damp shirt. There’s a click of a tongue and a small sigh as a hand presses against his back.

“Hey, you’re gonna strain your neck like this,” Taiga hears before he’s pulled off his arms. There’s a rustle of scraping cloth before he’s gently lowered to the floor, head knocking into one of his firm pillows.

There’s a click, and the faint light from the kitchen is gone, leaving the gentle glow from the moon to leak in from the windows.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is already 12k and we only get to see Aomine at the end of it.;; This is what I mean by very slow. /cries;; I have about 20k left in my drafts but I still need to polish it. so...I'M SORRY I HOPE I DIDN'T BORE YOU GUYS AHH. TqT I tried to sneak in mentions of Aomine in almost most of the scenes, like little easter eggs...ye. 
> 
> But anyways! Restating what I have in my disclaimer, I'm aware that it's kind of weird and laughable that Kagami doesn't have any furniture in his apartment especially since he's been there for a while, but please bear with it. Also I'm not too sure how trauma works, but again, grain of salt. ^__T Maybe a bucket of it ahhh.
> 
> Okay, I don't know. //wheezes;; (I REALLY SHOULDN'T BE DOING THIS BUT I DONT WANT TO STUDY, YOU SEE. ;;; )
> 
> OKAY, but if you liked it please leave kudos, or even better, comments! ^q^ I'd like to see what you guys think of it haha.
> 
> HOPE TO SEE YA NEXT TIME! (and hopefully soon!)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Earlie again~ I had thought I'd drop this, but I've received very kind messages asking me about this, so although it's not perfect, please accept this TqT;;; 
> 
> I haven't been writing at all lately, but probably I'll write again...soon...later;;

Taiga dreams again.

He’s alone in the school building, heat pressing at him on all sides.

Taiga gasps, chokes on stale air and hazily looks around. Hiding in the shadows are echoes of children laughing, phantom sounds singing amidst the crackle and roar.

A burning ceiling tile crashes onto a table, ignites the papers and books on the desk.

Orange, then gray.

It’s a preschool.

They’ve escorted most of the children and teachers outside, unharmed and just covered in a tinge of soot, they sit at the back of the ambulances, wrapped snugly in orange shock blankets—

Orange, then gray.

 _“We’ve cleared the building,_ ” someone reports in his ear as he emerges from one last sweep, lungs straining for fresh air. Sweaty bangs cling to the side of his forehead and as he rubs the sweat from his eyes, a teacher runs to him.

Please, I can’t find him, she grasps him through his charred coat, and screams that _Yuki is gone, Yuki was in the bathroom, please get Yuki—_

 _Faulty electrical wiring_ , Taiga faintly recalls as the cause of the fire, a spark that had fanned into a flame. He takes off running.

He ignores all protests in his ears, to stop and wait for orders.

Taiga charges back in, despite the risk of backlash and collapsing ceilings, searching through the remaining passages, distinctly remembering that the bathroom is tucked away in the corner of the hall.

 _Taiga, get back! You weren’t cleared to go in—_ his colleague yells, muffled through the pounding in Taiga’s head, then he breaks, running, limb with heavy limb, deeper into the inferno.

Drawings scribbled in markers and stapled to the wall curl up into smoke and ash, blocks of wooden toys flicker into quickly, charring lumps.

The bathroom is to the left. _Yuki? Yuki—_ he yells.

He can’t hear himself.

Crash.

His voice is caught in his throat before he hears a bloodcurdling scream.

The radio in his ear crackle alive with his teammates’ shouts, and he doesn’t understand how everything orange bleeds into black, and then to gray.

Taiga hears gray.

A rhyme from years ago,  when he was a Japanese boy misplaced in America, starts singing in his head— _ashes, ashes, we all fall down—_

He’s in another place, a room of beige curtains and hushed voices behind them; needles puncture his wrists and drip liquid from a bag hung high above his head.

Dripping, dripping down—

(Taiga’s not going to remember this in the morning: the images, the children laughing, singing in English.

Something cold covers him, like a veil, suffocating and reaching up to his nose— _we all fall down., take the key and—_

Then a cool hand is on his head, sweeping back his sticky hair, a hushed voice. _“Fuck, I don’t know, Shin. I just came back—”_

In the wet heat of the night, Taiga shivers as if cold and curls in on himself, waiting to wake up.)

—

Instead of the beeping of his alarm clock, Taiga wakes up to the sounds of metal clinking together and the occasional hums and murmurs as cupboards and drawers slam open and closed.

Someone’s singing in the kitchen (terribly, actually,) and Taiga racks his sleep-hazed brain for the list of possible assholes who would break into his kitchen and start _singing—_

Then he remembers: the police car, Aomine and his bruised face, the extra boxes and suitcases—and he staggers awake, pushing himself from the floor and holding his head, wanting to believe that everything was just a hallucination, from drinking too much beer (maybe; even though he hadn’t touched those things in _ages_.)

Something thin slides off his shoulders, something like a crisp bedsheet that _isn’t his._ Taiga stares at it for a long time, clenching the cool fabric under his fingers, before he blinks the haze away from his eyes and looks around him.

Boxes, a lot of them, just stacked up in towering columns. (And let’s not forget about that near dying plant sitting in front of the balcony glass door.)

“Oh, you’re up,” he hears Aomine say from the other side of the kitchen counter. Taiga can smell the aroma of hot coffee wafting into the living room. No doubt that Aomine has found his quickly, emptying box of instant coffee. “You all right?”

“…what?”

Taiga scrunches his brows and pinches the bridge of his nose, thinking that if this was a dream, he might as well wake up from it now.

“I…take that as a yes.”

There’s some movement from the kitchen that can be seen on the other side of the counter.

“So, I noticed. You don’t have a fridge,” Aomine points out the most obvious, and if it wasn’t—- _what was it?_ Taiga scrambles to find his phone still jammed in his pockets— _4’o clock in the fucking morning,_ Taiga wouldn’t be pinching the bridge of his nose like no tomorrow, wishing it _was_ all a dream.

“Yeah. Okay, _what_ are you doing?” Taiga manages to croak as he gets on his feet, wavering because everything in his body refuses to move, like creaky gears without oil.

After blindly shuffling around some boxes and scattered pillows, he heads to the kitchen, finding Aomine with his hand snug in his pockets, and blowing at wisps of steam from his paper cup.

“And morning to you, too,” he says after a particular loud (and irritating) sip. “Obviously, I’m finding food. You have nothing here.”

On the counter are strewn packets of instant foods and cans, things that Taiga and Tatsuya had sorted into the drawers and cupboards on the first day when Taiga moved in. _His things._

“We half rent, not food,” Taiga grumbles, brushing past him and he starts sticking the cans of corn (when did he have corn?) and beans back into the cupboard where they probably belonged.

(Still sleepy, Taiga barely notices that Aomine is dressed in something crisp and navy blue, with a tie just thrown carelessly over his shoulder.

One glance at his face, and Taiga sees that the swell on his face has gone down into something like an ugly purple lump.)

“So…what do I eat?” Aomine asks after a pause, as Taiga finishes piling everything into his cupboard and closes it with a slam.

“Maji burger, take-out, I don’t know. You take care of that yourself,” he says with a tired yawn, reaching over to grab a styrofoam cup for his own coffee. He tears open a packet of instant coffee and empties the powder to the bottom, before filling it up with the quickly cooling water from the kettle.

Aomine nods slowly and takes a slow sip, drinking quietly for a moment.

It’s too early in the morning to want to hold a coherent conversation, so Taiga just stands there, stirring the coffee in circles with a disposable chopstick he found set on the side, eyes drooping and staring at the mixture spinning into a light beige.

“…do you still cook?” Aomine shifts on the balls of his feet, still sipping on his coffee, still leaning back against the counter in that casual, laid-back grace he always seemed to have.

 _Sometimes_ , Taiga thinks and then nods.

Nothing more is said after that, and they share a rather long silence—just the two of them, standing in the kitchen without anything interesting to say.

There’s probably _a lot_ of things Taiga wants to say to him, most of it being every kind of insult he’s learned in the course of his life. But it’s four in the morning, Taiga is still brain dead from his lack of sleep and thinks he should have a quick shower to freshen up.

There’s the same mundane routine that he has to do today: equipment check, maybe some gym workouts, some other little things.

And Taiga thinks —about the people he’ll need to talk to, the reports he’ll need to read to catch up on the happenings at the station—that he doesn’t realize that he’s been stirring and staring at the coffee for the last three minutes, until there’s a warm hand sneaking under his bangs and resting on his forehead.

“Hey, Kagami—”

It’s the light touch, sudden familiarity that he’s not—won’t ever _want_ to be familiar with that makes Taiga jump in surprise, knocking his coffee cup aside.

The hot liquid _spills_ all over the counter and drips to the floor; the styrofoam cup glides in an arc and empties the rest onto the stovetop nearby.

“—fuck, I—” Taiga swears, and it takes every ounce of willpower to _not_ grab Aomine by the shoulder and shove him out the door, down the flight of steps and fling his suitcases and belongings after him. Because seriously, if Aomine’s going to be grating on his nerves like a cheese grater, he might as well punt him out.

Taiga takes a shuddering breath, closing his eyes and tries to think of happier things, _much happier things_ —

“Sorry, didn’t mean to,” Aomine says under his breath, quickly swiping a dishrag from the opposite counter and dropping to his knee to wipe at the puddle on the floor. “I’ll take care of it.”

Aomine sounds vaguely apologetic, and considering how it’s technically his fault, he better be.

—

After that embarrassing episode and also a quick, cold shower, Taiga leaves to work much earlier than usual, with his duffle bag hanging off his shoulder, because he honestly doesn’t know what to do with himself if he spends any minute longer in the same breathing space with the one asshole called Aomine Daiki.

Before he left, he made sure to outline one very important thing with his new housemate; _I’m going to kill you if I’m one ramen bowl short._

He’s protective of them even if they taste like shit half the time, it’s _his_ and he’s  _not_ sharing. But Aomine waved him off with a careless flap of a hand, drinking _yet another_ cup of Taiga’s instant coffee. _Yeah, yeah, don’t worry. I’m not going to eat your junk food, you glutton._

 _Punk,_ Taiga hissed back as he tied the knots to his shoelaces.

 _Pig_ , Aomine only calmly dished back over the rim of his cup.

Taiga swore he’s blown several major veins in his forehead. _Fucking—_

—which that sparked a five-minute war of slinging names and profanities at each other, before Taiga decided that the best insult is a door slammed in Aomine’s face.

His lungs feel inflamed, burning with air, as he walks, or stomps, down the paved road to work, face red from the yelling and cheeks puffed because that’s immature— _so fucking immature._

(But at the same time, there’s this buzz, a flutter in the pit of his stomach, a bounce in his step, and a feeling he’s trying to ignore.

A tiny voice giddily replaying the exchange in the back of his head— _too long. It’s been too long._ )

—

“You look chippy, did something good happen?” Minoru asks during maintenance.

“Is that supposed to be funny, ‘cus it’s not,” Taiga grumbles, and then tosses the ropes he’s coiled back off to the side, narrowly missing a bucket of mop water. He’s doing things with more force than necessary, dunking a rag into the dirty water and watching puddles form onto the floor.

Minoru only crosses her arms, watching him, expectantly.

“Well, it’s the first time you looked relatively…” She shrugs, eyebrows raising. “…alive.”

“Great news,” Taiga remarks, dryly, carries a cleaner bucket of water back over to the front wheels. “As if I didn’t  already know that.”

A pause right there and Taiga chokes the daylights out of whatever is in his hand, but he’s glad his coworker drops the subject, but not without a giggle, “So, something good _did_ happen.”

—

His morning’s annoyance slowly evolves into curiosity while he mindlessly bench short sets at the station’s gym.

Taiga barely pays attention to the rumors circulating among a group of resting squadmates, but he catches tidbits, something about the increased occurrences of fires and the MPD investigating into the case.

Okay, so he does know a little about it.

Fires have been breaking out almost every week since the start of summer; but since Taiga stupidly sprained his leg the last some weeks ago, he had been out of the loop more than he would like to be.

But his mind is elsewhere as he puzzles about Aomine, the bruises on his face, and that shirt he wore the night before—a busty woman with her boobs half-hanging out with neon _English_ stamped all over.

 _Undercover thing,_ he had mentioned but Taiga is very convinced he’s housing a drug dealer that the cops had to escort home from the streets, or something.

It’s not a far stretch of a guess.

Maybe, somewhere along the last decade of his life, Aomine took the road down the path of the wrong, was rejected from basketball teams (unlikely, but hey,) and ended up snorting some or smoking some. He had the looks for it too and Taiga could practically smell the booze and cigarette smoke off him when he had slapped the band-aid on his face.

Maybe he should call the police on him, Taiga thinks once but forgets later when he shuffles into the station’s kitchen to help out with marinating chicken breast for dinner.

(But then there’s the irony where Aomine was wearing something _entirely different_ that morning, but the memory is lost to Taiga because all he remembers is the heated swearing contest and then the defiant slam of the door.)

—

“He’s a problem child,” Taiga concludes to Tetsuya during his lunch break, as he leans over the picket fence and drinks from the apple juice box that little Tadashi had given him when he stopped by.

Tetsuya always tells Taiga to stop bullying kids into giving him their lunch, but it’s the _kids_ that give them him the juice box. Kagami wouldn’t _dare_ approach them, _at all._

“What makes you say that?” Tetsuya asks calmly, but there’s an overprotective edge to his voice and a steely sharpness in his polite smile. “My students are well-behaved—”

“What? No, _no_ , I meant Aomine,” Taiga whispers quickly, and the gentle, passive gaze returns to Tetsuya’s face, although a touch confused. Taiga glances around before he admits, “I think he has problems.”

There’s a long pause as Tetsuya stares at him with a blank look, eyes flickering around his face, first at his eyes and then a bit lower at the deep bags under them, before asking, “ _He_ …has problems?”

“Well, yeah. Last night, he showed up with his entire face smashed in,” Taiga says. “Wearing stuff you’d see some high school punk wearing, I mean, he’s almost _thirty—_ ”

It takes Tetsuya a moment of blinking, before: “Ah, Taiga-kun, actually I think—”

His phone beeps just then, and Taiga waves him off in favor of checking his message.

_Emergency. District 5; Machigi Restaurant._

Taiga bids Tetsuya a quick goodbye before he sprints away to catch a bus back to work.

—

“Kagami,” he says, stern and trying to sound professional despite being completely out of breath for hunting down the number 6 bus and latching on. The bus rocks as it throws itself over potholes and uneven dents on the street.

_“I know you’re in the middle of break, but we just got a call. How fast can you make it there?”_

Taiga grapples onto the poles, palm sweaty as he bends down to look at the streets outside.

He’s familiar with the area, catching sight of the colorful video rent shop and then an udon shop with it's long line outside. Three minutes by bus, if only traffic is kind to him.

“Five minutes, at least.”

_“Good. Meet us there. We’ll get your gear. The fire’s been managed by some civilians, but it’s getting worse. We don’t know if there are still people inside.”_

The bus dings with the automated announcement of arriving at the 4th block before Taiga sees a long snake of cars stopped ahead of him, red lights searing and a huge delivery truck sneaking its way into the lane.

Never mind, traffic is never kind.

Running there would be much faster.

“Understood, chief.”

It actually takes him about ten minutes, but only because he’s sprinting from miles away, having gotten off right in the middle of the busy intersection where the bus had been jammed up.

When he arrives, the restaurant is bellowed in smoke, seeping out from the frame of a broken glass window, and licks of flame flickering along the cracks.

Taiga meets his team there; a hose has been dragged into the restaurant, most probably to the kitchen where a separate squad had been working to contain the flames.

Near him, Akiba is suiting himself up, gas mask, coat, axe to break down doors and clear passageways—

“Situation?” Taiga asks as he shrugs on his coat and buckles himself up, cupping the gas mask over his face, and fixes his helmet.

“There are some people in the far back of the restaurant. We’ve already sent in a team of two,” Minoru tells him as she hands him his axe to slip onto his side. He listens to vague conversations crackling from the communicator fixed on her shoulder as she makes last minute fixes to his suit.

She taps the side of his helmet. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” Taiga lies, taking a deep breath and quickly jogging into the burning building, already feeling sticky despite wearing a fireproof suit.

As he turns a blocked corner, squinting into the bellowing smoke, he hears something like, _“Fucking arsonists—”_ buzz in the bluetooth in his ear.

—

Taiga isn’t a special case.

Minoru has a thin scar stretching from her arm to her back, given to her years ago when she hacked through a door and a sharp piece of glass tore through her gear.

Akiba had a faulty gas mask once, inhaled too much smoke, fell unconscious during a rescue on a burning three-floor building, and spent days in the hospital afterwards clearing out his lungs.

Then there’s Taiga, whose naiviety left him with a second-degree burn, trapped under a hot beam, the heat eating away at his suit, into his clothes, into his skin—

Fires do things to people.

He’s heard stories where some resign right after regaining consciousness in their hospital beds. Some shriek at the sudden flare of a cigarette lighter, seeing the red and orange as an inferno, and feels a ghost pain sting at their bones.

The ones remaining at the station all have a story to tell, having overcome their fears with friendship, family— some kind of therapy. And in some ways, Taiga feels more at home there, sleeping with them in the organized bunk beds and more-than-homey quarters.

But they can’t stay there forever.

At the end of the shift, they all have a home to return to, a special someone, a budding family with children, and one by one, they leave him.

There’s always new people cycling in though, different stories, the same, shared hauntings.

But then the chief demands Taiga to go home, to rest, rest, rest. _It’s an order_ , she says and once had his own co-workers wrestle him out.

Taiga ends up dragging his feet up the worn stairwell, unlocking the door with his keys, and walking into the living room.

It’s dark and stuffy, with ghosts clinging onto the walls and children’s laughter—especially children’s laughter, bouncing against every corner like a haunting reminder of his naivety, his fears.

Taiga throws his phone onto the kitchen counter, listening to the weather forecast for the rest of the day, and lies there on his back, staring at the ceiling.

The jingle of advertisements fills up the white noise in his apartment.

—

Taiga doesn’t come back until the following morning at five a.m with the sun making its slow trek into Thursday morning.

His bones ache and his body is still weaning off the adrenaline spike from the fire rescue the day before.

Rescues still startle him. The afterburn of smoke itch at his nose and shakes him up well into the next day.

The images of black and orange summons sickening nausea in his gut, and he can’t stomach anything more than a glass of water and a dry pack of crackers. He usually deals with things with copious amounts of sleep, but he’d rather get it anywhere _not_ here.

The space in front of his door is empty now, revealing its worn, peeling, off-white walls with that flickering lamp that he needs to pester the land-lady to fix.

Taiga scours his pockets for his red lanyard of keys, before he realizes that it’s not there, where it’s supposed to be.

He checks and double-checks his pockets and bag, swiping for a string, but it’s gone missing.

Now, there are not many instances when Taiga entertains the thought of breaking into his own apartment, but he _theoretically_ could if he wanted to.

His unit is on the second floor and there’s a sturdy-enough pipe and some footholds dotting up the side of the building which he could _theoretically_ use to scramble up onto his balcony.

(Or, he could just ask the neighbors next door to borrow their balcony and take a leap of faith and hope he snags onto the railings of his own.

But that would require him awkwardly making excuses about why a grown man, nearly thirty years old, still forgets his keys inside.)

Taiga glares at the door, old thing with the wood cracking near the corner, and grasps the knob. He twists it—locked.

Figures.

Taiga isn’t sure if he should feel relieved or angered that Aomine locked the door when he left to do god-knows-what, but the door is locked and he’s not going to kick it open and risk property damage.

Taiga resigns his fate and sinks down against the door, throwing his head back in frustration, breathing slowly to ease the urge to vomit last night’s measly dinner of too-dry chicken and rice.

It’s one irritating thing after another.

Aomine showing up with his face bruised in, Aomine killing his mood for the entire day, _Aomine_ in general.

(Somehow, things just feel better if he just blames all his misfortunes on him, even when it technically really isn’t his fault. Just give him a moment to be petty.)

Well—Taiga can’t sit around outside his own apartment waiting for the guy to show up from whatever he’s doing, so he stands up and gathers the courage to face the next door, staring at the name tag _Kimura_ , and raising a fist to knock.

(He feels near-sick now, and half-hopes he doesn’t throw up on his neighbors; god, that would be awful.)

Taiga breathes in, re-rehearses what he’d say before he hears a whistle.

Something low, catchy, the same department store song Taiga’s been singing the past two nights, before he hears heavy footsteps turn the corner.

At first glance, Taiga sees a police uniform and sport shades perched on the bridge of the man’s nose, and he thinks _fucking Aomine, what did you do again,_ before the mess of navy blue hair and tanned skin, familiar jaw and relaxed posture dissolves his thoughts into:

 _Wait,_ that’s Aomine _fucking_ Daiki.

What the fuck.

“Oh, there you are,” Aomine says without missing a beat, in that irritating flippant tone of his and there’s a backpack hanging off his shoulder. He pushes his shades up his forehead and grins, the disappearing swell still making his smile more crooked than usual. “Thought you disappeared off somewhere.”

“I have something called work,” Taiga says, breath shallow, discretely lowering his hand down and side-stepping away from Kimura’s door.

Aomine passes him and pulls out a dangling key on a—

Red.

Lanyard.

Taiga feels veins in his forehead snap as Aomine unlocks and pushes the door open, walking in like he owns the place.

(Okay, technically he half-owns it now, but as the first person to live there, Taiga still can maintain some of his integrity.)

“You fucking asshole, that’s mine—” Taiga hisses and snatches his keys away from him. Aomine relinquishes the grip without question and stares at him after a few confused blinks.

“Well.” he shrugs with an impassive look (god, it _pisses_ Taiga off); Aomine pulls off his backpack and sets it on the counter. “You left it on the floor.”

“Could’ve called me to give it back,” Taiga murmurs, brushing past him and into the kitchen.

“Yeah, as if you even answer.”

The tiles and cupboard swirls for a moment and he reaches out to press his hand against the counter for balance. Taiga closes his eyes and then reopens them. He feels a pressure against the middle of his chest.

Sleep.

Sleep always solves this, he thinks as he opens cupboards and drawers trying to remember where he had tossed Shintarou’s prescriptions.

“I got breakfast,” Aomine says distantly from somewhere behind him, and the sound of a bag zipping open sounds through the air. “Just convenience store stuff on my way back from the department. Figured you don’t eat real food since ramen is all you have.”

“Food is still food,” Taiga mutters as he closes the third cupboard to the left, it's full of ramen, chicken flavored. He lets out a slow breath; did he really stash his meds in the kitchen? “Doesn’t matter what kind, as long as you’re full.”

Aomine stares at him again with the same long, judging silence.

“ _What_ ,” Taiga snaps, mouth turned down in a frown, and still trying to look for his meds before the smell of hot food—like teriyaki chicken—floats to his nose.

“Well, I guess you don’t need this then,” Aomine says. There’s a smug smile that should be accompanying that tone of his, but Taiga doesn’t bother to look—even when, whatever the hell it is smells so good.

“I don’t.”

A pair of chopsticks break apart and the plastic bag crinkles loudly, tempting, taunting. “…Sure you don’t want it?”

“I’m not hungry,” Taiga says definitively, swallowing a little and trying not to _drool_ at the thought of sesame seeds sprinkled on teriyaki chicken and the steaming sweet rice underneath.

For most cases, when he’s back, fresh from a rescue, he doesn’t dare to eat anything he can’t stomach. Nausea, for the most part, replaces hunger, which in turn makes him dizzy and tired, but—his ear twitches at the sound of the plastic cover being torn off a bento.

“Stop being a stubborn prick,” he hears Aomine sigh, and Taiga knows he doesn’t have the breath left in him to get into another five-minute name-calling war, but he whisks toward Aomine anyways, eyebrows furrowed—

“What the— _mmph–_ -”

A piece of chicken is shoved into his mouth, chopsticks hanging loosely from being stabbed through the other end.

Aomine looks at him with a brow drawn down and a thin frown on his face. Near his other hand are two other bentos, sukiyaki and then nigiri sushi.

“If it’s your meds, they’re in the bathroom, behind the mirror,” Aomine says and rips apart his own pair of chopsticks, clean down the middle, and neatly taps them against the counter.

He opens his sukiyaki bento, and picks at the cut strips of beef. There’s a tired sigh he nearly suppresses. “You should eat first before taking them.”

Taiga watches Aomine suspiciously as he scarfs down his own box, wondering if he should spit out the chicken that he so rudely jabbed in his mouth.

But the chicken tastes oddly delicious on his tongue, and Aomine—looks exhausted, almost sleep deprived, like he’s been running on several cups of black coffee, and too tired to argue right now.

(It’s hard to believe that Aomine is a cop and not a street punk; but the idea of Aomine chasing burglars instead of being one makes a bit more sense.)

“Thanks for the food,” Taiga mumbles with the chicken half-chewed in his mouth as he meekly slides his bento in front of him.

As he picks up a small bundle of rice with his chopsticks, he swears he hears Aomine snort a little, but otherwise they eat breakfast in relative silence.

(Maybe if it was soggy ramen noodles or lukewarm miso soup, Taiga’s nausea would have gotten the better of him, forced things back up his throat and leave nothing but a bitter bile on his tongue.

But this was chicken—store bought and drenched in marinated sauce, and oddly, Taiga was able to finish about half of it before he decided to shove the rest at Aomine and saunter off to the bathroom to find his relocated pillbox.)

—

“So, you’re a cop,” Taiga says, waiting for his medicine to kick in and take him off to sleep even though the morning was climbing high into the noon sky.

Sprawled on his room’s floor with a pillow under his head, he watches Aomine slide off his duty belt onto a nearby cardboard box, marveling at the gun in its holster, handcuff case, taser, oc spray can—things Taiga has seen in cop shows but not on an actual person.

“…didn’t know you had it in you.”

But the image of Aomine sprinting down people-crowded streets with a baton in his hand seems strangely fitting, since he _did_ boast more than average agility and speed in high school.

“I deal with theft, domestic squabbles, but mostly juveniles since Shiba’s got a shit ton of them,” Aomine says, with an arrogant smirk on his face.

He opens up his backpack and throws the belt inside carelessly. Taiga has to wonder if it’s normal police protocol to just irresponsibly leave things like a gun in a backpack. “I was trying to blend in the other day but the kids started fighting. Got in the middle of it, trying to break it up.”

“Right,” Taiga murmurs, too tired to be sarcastic. He can’t hide the fascination when Aomine unstraps another gun holster from his ankle. The mound of weapons and police goodies just grow into a mess on the floor as velcro and buttons are being undone.

“So, what are you doing now?” Aomine asks distractedly, packing up everything into his bag, dropping things in one after another.

“TFD,” Taiga answers sleepily with a yawn, blinking slowly as the sunlight from the window start to grow fuzzy. He decides to slide his eyes shut against the bright light. “Fires, vehicle rescue…stuff.”

“Oh yeah…wasn’t there the restaurant that caught fire yesterday?” Aomine asks, his voice growing into something thin and far away. “Something like cooking negligence or something.”

Taiga hums in agreement. He draws in a breath, tiredly murmuring. “So… you didn’t play in the BJ leagues after graduation…”

There’s a pause and Taiga blinks his eyes open, squinting a bit from the bright windows behind Aomine’s head.

“I did. But I got bored after a few years,” Aomine says carefully, turning his head away as he ducks to look for something in his bag.

Taiga watches him for a while before tiredness blankets over him like a soft wave, and he blinks slowly. With a small huff of air, he mumbles, “What a waste of talent…”

Aomine flops to the ground and nabs one of the pillows before shifting, making himself comfortable on the floor.

There’s a slow intake of breath as it evens out; Taiga peeks again and sees Aomine’s back, rumpled uniform and all, just an arm’s length away,

“…Yeah, I guess.”

—

Same nightmare, same dream, this time Taiga remembers it all when he wakes up with a jolt in the early evening with the curtains drawn up tight to block out the setting sun.

He stares at the ceiling, heart pounding wildly in his ribcage. The world shudders when he blinks, threatening to crumble if he breathed too quickly—one, two, three, _breathe_.

Taiga slowly looks around and sees that he had thrown his arm out, toward Aomine’s back, his hand brushing against the hollow between his shoulder blades.

Aomine is motionless, the steady rise and fall of his shoulder being the only indication that he’s still sleeping. Taiga closes his eyes, but remembers the heat crawling over his skin— _ashes, ashes, we all fall—_

His breathing is stilted, it’s hard to breathe again and Taiga shifts onto his side instead of his back, finding it easier for his lungs.

He’s exhausted, but he fights to keep his eyes awake, knowing that if he closes them, he’ll see the memory again, hear the song once more. And he doesn’t want that— _enough_ , it’s enough.

 _I’m here_ , Aomine’s sudden, soft sigh seems to say, and Taiga finds some relief in that, however odd it is.

The navy blue of his uniform becomes a soft blur, and it probably takes Taiga a few minutes before he dozes back into shallow slumber.

—

(He swears he feels a calloused hand on his head, a knuckle tracing his jaw and then brushing away his bangs. A low breath hovers on his brow as a shadow hangs over him, and usually, in his dreams, black shadows are terrifying, but this one is not.)

Taiga snaps awake when everything suddenly falls on him—pressure crushing down on his chest as there’s a loud explosion of silence in his ears.

He first notices the hard pillow pressing into his side, and when the room aligns itself back into focus, he sees Aomine—-stretching tiredly and scratching the back of his head, awake from sleep and patting away the mess in his hair.

“I’m hungry,” he says as Taiga blinks himself back into reality and draws in a breath—just a dream, just another dream. “There’s an Italian place around here. Wanna come with?”

Mouth dry and too exhausted to argue, Taiga nods at that.

He hasn’t eaten Italian for years (or a few months.) And it’d be good to stretch his legs, walk a couple blocks, get fresh air, walk off the nightmare like he always had—-no big deal.

Taiga goes to find his wallet in his duffle bag before he remembers—he’s kind of broke.

Well, not broke, but Taiga is scatterbrained and forgets to withdraw money from his bank since direct-deposit is how he’s paid every bi-weekly, so his wallet is nearly empty, and he says so as much.

“My treat. I don’t want to eat there by myself like a loser,” Aomine says with a wave of his hand and a trace of a yawn in his voice.

“Nothing wrong with eating alone,” Taiga says, slipping on sneakers because he, at least, had the decency to change out of his heavy boots, but Aomine just yanks off his tie and takes his backpack with him, not bothering to smooth away the creases of his uniform at all.

“Yeah, but it’s lonely,” he says with a small shrug and his honesty startles Taiga—because back when Aomine was just an awkward teenager (well, both of them were) they’d never be caught saying those kinds of things.

But ten years is a long time and people change, things happen, and Taiga brushes it off as he shuts and locks their door.

Taiga scoffs, rolling his eyes, “Were you always this spoiled?”

Aomine laughs with that odd, crooked grin. “Did you forget?”

—

Later, Taiga learns that Aomine gets 10% discount off the dinner menu if he shows up like that—crinkled blue uniform, half tucked into his pants and all.

Sneaky bastard, Taiga thinks as he chews on his meatballs from his plate. He grumbles, “You’re taking advantage of the owner’s kindness.”

The owner being a jovial middle-aged man who threw his arm around Aomine’s shoulder, reeled him close to whisper things, secret things, before he laughed out loud and clapped Aomine on the back, hard enough to make him stumble.

“Hey, the guy owes me a few. I helped him out a couple years back, so ten percent off a meal every so often isn’t doing any harm.” Aomine spears a shredded piece of chicken parmesan, twirls it around before he eats it. He’s shoveling the last bits of sauce with his fork. “I’m ordering a second plate, want one?”

Taiga chews quietly on his meatball, narrowing his eyes at him under the glow of the candlelight in the middle of their table.

It’s already unsettling being treated out to dinner, but being offered more because of his enormous appetite—his pride is suffering, just a little.

Taiga reaches for his glass of water. “I’ll pay for this one.”

“It’s fine.”

Aomine waves down one of the waiters.

—

(Conversation is sparse on Taiga’s part. He just doesn’t know what to say, what he can say, and he’s not sure if he actually wants to say anything at all.

But Aomine fills in the gaps almost effortlessly, twirling his fork into his pasta and sharing the story about him and the restaurant’s owner, how there was a minor break-in and he had to find the culprit, and—Taiga thinks it’s weird.

Because Aomine hardly says this much—or he used to not say so much, and as Taiga watches Aomine laugh softly at the memory of nearly causing a traffic incident, he wonders emptily—when did Aomine start smiling like that?)

—

Afterwards, Taiga stands by the door, arms crossed and waiting for Aomine to wrap up his light chit-chat with the owner at the back of the restaurant.

He doesn’t really fault him; after all, it’s only common manners to thank the hand that fed them, but it is taking a long while.

Dinner was substantial, a bit _too_ fancy for Taiga’s tastes, but he’s sure he could whip up something similarly tasty, given a fridge and proper ingredients, of course.

Taiga surveys the restaurant in his boredom, sweeping from the vintage pictures on the wall, to the low, dim lighting for the romantic atmosphere,  and he noticed most tables are filled with people dolled in pressed shirts and dresses, and speaking in hushed, low voices, and somehow he remembers—

(Her soft, disconnected, smile, lips glossed a light pink, with her bright blue eyes hidden behind mascara’d lashes, hand holding his, and words, _“You’ve changed.”)_

—and he’s not sure why.

“Hey, let’s go,” Aomine says, pulling Taiga from his thoughts. He brushes by him, shoulders sliding against his as he makes his way out into the hot, humid night, and leaves the door, slightly ajar.

Taiga says nothing but sighs, and shoves his hands into his pockets, finding pieces of a receipt he’s forgotten to take out. Head slightly bowed, he follows after him.

It’s a peaceful evening.

—

Their walk back to the apartment is in relatively comfortable silence. (Or _awkward_ , if Taiga bothers to think that much into it.)

Aomine walks a few steps ahead of him, a hand in his pockets and another hand on the straps of his backpack (looking heavier, and fuller than usual) that’s slung over his shoulder. Taiga follows him from behind, glancing around the residential roads, not too familiar with the route Aomine is taking him through.

“Never been here before,” Taiga comments, gruffly.

Aomine retorts, “Have you ever been out of your house?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean.”

They pass by a park with a raised stone wall, cracking in between the bricks; one of the parks that was recently renovated, Taiga remembers.

Just ahead, there are basketball courts behind a chain fence, riddled with kids in tank tops and arm sleeves, racing down from basket to basket with a ball in their hands.

Taiga spots a particularly scrawny kid in the sea of taller middle schoolers, trying to screen another player valiantly, but failing.

“It’s been a while since we played,” Aomine says suddenly, and Taiga tears his eyes away from the courts to see a ball magicked out of nowhere (probably his bag) and spinning and sliding around Aomine’s arm.

Little tricks and the like, Aomine hasn’t lost any of his ball-handling grace.

Aomine tosses him the ball. “Wanna have a go?”

Taiga catches it on reflex, and takes a second to appreciate the rough texture against his hand, and how incredibly comfortable it is in his palm.

When he looks up, Aomine has already kicked open the fenced gate and crashed his way through the crowd of students, asking if anyone’s up for a game, and completely oblivious to the wary stares at his uniform.

It would’ve been outright embarrassing if there wasn’t a kid who just stepped up to Aomine like an old friend, arm outstretched for a fist bump. Aomine seems to know the boy. 

“He’s with you?” Taiga hears within earshot as the kid motions to him and looks at Aomine for confirmation.

Aomine gives Taiga a glance, “Yeah, count him in.”

The kid surveys Taiga, looking him up and down and then whirls back, “Woah, ‘aight, my team’s taking the angry eyebrows—”

Taiga pretends not to hear Aomine snort.

—

Taiga leaves it to Aomine and the kid (Katsuki?) to sort through the remaining people for a game of three-on-three, and while they do that Taiga thinks that this is highly unfair since they are at least twice the age of these kids with year(s) of professional experience under their belt.

 _Just a game of pick up,_ Aomine says as if he could read his mind, and he sorts himself onto the opposing half-court. _Nothing serious. Don’t go too hard on them, Taiga-kun._

Aomine _says_ that, but then again nothing he says can ever be taken seriously, and Aomine single-handedly smashes Taiga’s team down.

(Well, he does pass every so often to the other two kids, but ever since they found out, during the middle of the game, that Aomine could slam a drunk, all balls has been passed to him once they cross the rebound line.)

In which, Taiga demands a rematch and partially because the kid, Katsuki, is calling foul—not like he knows what a foul even means—and the original game of making ten baskets is pushed up to fifteen, then twenty, until time passes deeper into the night and Aomine tells everyone under the age of twenty to _go home._

Most of the kids filter and disperse from the street court, whining and booing at Aomine, but Katsuki huffs and turns to Aomine with a half-smile and a finger rudely pointing in Taiga’s direction, _This guys’s good, bring him along next time._

Somehow, he feels something warm swelling in his chest at the thought of being called good and having a kid beaming at him with a smile. Taiga ends up waving at him as he darts away to head back home.

They stay behind on a half-court though, because Aomine manages to one-up Taiga and make a basket when he wasn’t paying attention, and Taiga isn’t ready to give up just yet. He has two plates of very greasy Italian noodles to burn off after all.

Best out of thirty, and somewhere around twenty-five, they forget about points or who’s winning, and instead, exchange goading remarks punctured with huffs of breath in between.

It becomes a game of just breaking past the other’s guard and tossing or dunking the ball into the hoop, and Taiga is absolutely irritated that Aomine is as fluid as ever with his movements and hasn’t broken out into a mad sweat, despite wearing his stuffy uniform.

Taiga’s lungs are straining for breath, and his arms and limbs burn from the push and pull tension in his movements.

All this and the surface of the ball scraping as it whirls under his hand and the warmth in his muscles are intimately familiar, working slowly at his rusty, muscle memory. He hasn’t really touched the ball like this in ages.

Then there’s Aomine and his plays.

There is semblance to the same high schooler he’s faced off for three years, on both street courts and official matches, but for the most part Aomine’s movements have become sharper, confusing, flexible, _better_ —and Taiga’s excitement quickly erodes into some other uncomfortable feeling when he realizes he _can’t_ keep up.

His legs give out on him first, and then it’s his lungs, and then prickling, sharp pain in his sides. Taiga just ducks his head low, heaving for his breath, but never feeling as if he could catch it.

The rhythm in Aomine’s footwork slows down just near the basket, and Aomine catches the ball from its descent and tucks it under his arm.

“I didn’t tire you out or anything, did I?”

Taiga doesn’t speak, doesn’t say anything, just focuses on holding his breath and slowing it down. Aomine doesn’t mind, and instead slips the ball back into his bag.

“Another match,” Taiga finally says, swallowing a gulp of air (and with it, some pride. Because Aomine has become better, stronger, and Taiga—he hasn’t played like this for _years_. There’s a churning in his stomach, something uncomfortable but stirring.)

“Next time. I’ll win for sure.”

Aomine is quiet for a few moments before he laughs, the cheeky grin reaching up to his eyes. “You’re years ahead of yourself if you think you can beat me.”

“Shut up,” Taiga grumbles. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he grudgingly sees some truth in that.

—

Night shift again, Aomine disappears after a quick shower and a change of clothes. He’s now wearing a tanktop, a cap, and basketball shorts that reach a little past his knees. Underneath that loose shirt of his is his duty belt, barely noticeable.

“See you tomorrow morning.” Aomine says from the doorway and Taiga just nods and watches him disappear behind the click of the door.

He’s tired, staring up at the ceiling before he decides to shut his eyes.

(music. He hears music; faint whistling of an ambulance outside, yells, chaos.)

Taiga tosses onto his side. He watches the shadows and listens to the faint ticking of a clock, from somewhere in the apartment.

(hands, hands all over; they grab him through his suit, at his arms and pull him out, he hits the ground, his helmet cushions his fall, sends a pain splitting through his skull. Music still sings.)

Night inches into morning.

—

This becomes their apartment after a few weeks:

The same walls, same floor, but less brown and more color—less boxes and more _things_ because on the days Taiga has his twenty-four hour shifts, Aomine makes a mess out of the boxes that he’s brought in with him and scours through Taiga’s belongings as well.

Though, really it’s probably Aomine’s (poor) attempt at organization.

Taiga had come back to his ramen bowls being piled atop each other like a pyramid in the cupboard drawers, with a few lonesome pieces scattered near the base. He finds various magazines (basketball monthlies and gravure) in short stacks and pressed up against the walls. Alongside them are some flattened cardboard leaning discretely into the corner.

And then, there are piles and piles of clothes everywhere.

For Taiga, he separates his clothes into a neatly folded stack of laundry and then a dirty pile of whites and colors.

Aomine, though, lives out of his suitcase and his clothes and mis-strewn ties start crawling their way up and down the halls; his belts, crinkled uniform shirts, and slacks hang off every possible surface.

When Aomine’s done showering, he just tosses everything together into a mountain near the bathroom, not caring about when laundry day is, only knowing that it happens when it happens.

(Which makes Taiga scrunch his nose up in irritation, and one day, when the pile nearly trips him on his way down the hall, he decides to just wash everything.

He also decided to fold them because he’s seen Aomine in a creased uniform with his collar popping up too many times to _not be_ bothered.)

Their work schedules barely match up, save for odd mornings spent sleeping in and the weird after-midnight snack times of convenience store bentos or baked chips from the supermarket, so Taiga starts leaving Aomine messages, making use of the freebie memo and pen with _SHIBA FIRE DEPARTMENT_ printed on it in faded green.

(One of the notes being:

In which Aomine replies with a torn piece of paper and uglier than coherent handwriting:

And the pages of Taiga’s memo book are eaten up until there’s almost none left, and so he starts _texting_ Aomine reminders about house-keeping rules.

The texts reading: _Keep your socks out of the whites pile_ and _Stop stealing the soap from the sink and leaving it in the shower,_ ( _I like it, it’s minty_ , Aomine texts back) and _I’m at the grocery store, is there anything you want me to get for you?_ ( _I want to eat curry tonight_ ) _No. shut up._

(But Taiga would come back anyways with some mild and then spicy chicken katsu curry from _Coco Ichiban_ , packaged up in styrofoam bowls. He’d devour a bowl and then consider eating the other before Aomine struggles to get the door open while fighting to keep his plastic bags of takeout upright.)

Sometime in the third week, there are no traces of cardboard left, except for the largest box left in the middle of the living room, stained with curry and what-have-you’s along the surface that has instructions on how to install a TV.

Which gave Aomine the bright idea of buying one from a second-hand store from god knows where, and it had been sitting in the corner near the outlet, collecting dust because he had no idea how to set it up.

(Waste of money, Taiga thinks, until one day, he searches the internet for a tutorial and after hours of fiddling, manages to hook up cable to their TV, only finding out about the screen’s discoloration, and how blues become greens, and faces turn orange.)

There are finally things in the apartment that _aren’t_ just cardboard boxes, and Taiga spends most of his free time sprawled on the floor (with or without Aomine), lazily watching cheesy soap dramas and often times yelling at protagonists too.

And during some nights, after dinners, they’d be at the street court, playing quick one-on-one’s (Aomine still has yet to lose) before Aomine has to disappear off again.

Days just slide into place like that.

—

Money becomes a huge issue within the third week because Taiga can’t keep track of who bought what, or who ate what, or who used that thing that the other person bought with his own money.

So, one morning, after Aomine walked through the door, finished with work, Taiga said: _Anything we buy for food or the house will come out of a shared wallet._

Which sounded like a pretty good idea if only Taiga didn’t blow everything out within the first few days because he just so happened to see a 30-70% sale at this home furnishing and improvement store on his way home, and the siren call of good bargains just lured him in.

Aomine lectured him after that, with the long receipt in one hand and a pen in the other, irritated that Taiga needlessly bought rugs when they obviously didn’t need them, or that he bought more towels when they had enough, or that they had stocked on too many house-cleaners that it could be considered a chemical hazard.

Which surprised Taiga at first, because long ago, Aomine, being the slob that he was (still kind of is,) wouldn’t care about these things at all—which is a testament to the fact that all people change. And Taiga sulked the entire evening before Aomine shooed him away to return them.

“I’m going to manage the money,” Aomine says as they deposit the weekly twenty thousand into the leather folds. “And we’re not buying anything unless we consult each other.”

“Sounds fair,” Taiga mumbles with a grudging twitch in his lips, as he slides some bills in there, wrapped up in the return receipt from the Home centre.

—

“Oh, Taiga,” Tatsuya says in mild surprise, watching him plop down at the corner of the bar, in his usual place, on a random Wednesday at midnight. “Haven’t seen or heard from you in a while. I was wondering what you were up to.”

“I was—” Taiga starts, auto-firing the usual excuse, before he catches himself with a pause. “—Aomine decided that he was going to move in with me, so I became….” Taiga deflates a little and coughs into his hand. “Uh….busy.”

“Well, that’s to be expected,” Tatsuya says with a slight quirk in his lips, as he pours Taiga the normal—cold apple cider. “After all that cooping in that bleak apartment of yours, I guess some domestic bliss would be good for you.”

Taiga takes the glass, feeling the moisture beading up against the sides.

“I don’t even want to know what you mean by that,” Taiga grumbles against the rim, before he takes a long, thirsty drink from it.

—

“How did you even get kicked out?” Taiga asks, pushing the shopping cart down aisle 6, kitchen appliances.

(They don’t have a fridge yet—they _should have_ —but meals at restaurants are getting more expensive, and if they just buy groceries the day of, simple meals can be made.)

Aomine is ahead of him, shoveling things like chopsticks and towels (that Taiga eventually sorts through and puts back onto the shelf,) into the cart.

“I’m a cop, I get calls in the middle of the night to stop shit a block away from my place,” Aomine drawls, and then considers the difference between the the stainless steel frying pan and a non-stick, glancing at the descriptions and then at the price labels.

“That’s not really a reason to kick you out.”  Taiga grabs for the non-stick, less of a hassle to clean, and throws it into the cart. It clatters with the plastic bowls and nearly misses the porcelain dish plates.

“Well, I sometimes let kids stay over, and…stuff happens—” Aomine says, scratching his cheek.

Taiga pushes the cart ahead of him, making a bee-line to where the pots sit on the shelf. “That explains a lot.”

—

On the cupboard is a piece of paper, creased and written on for too many times.

—

One day at work, in the middle of equipment maintenance, chief mentions something about the station replacing one of their old coffee tables in the common rooms. Taiga jumps at the chance and asks politely if he could take the old one for himself.

Taiga should’ve thought it through more when his shift ended earlier, at eleven at night, because now he has no idea how to _walk_ it back to the apartment.

There’s not many people in Japan that own a car. Most walk to places, some ride bikes or take the train or bus.

Out of the small pool of people Taiga knows, the only person that _has_ a car available would be Seijuurou, but ringing up the proud Akashi at eleven at night and asking him to travel from Kyoto to Tokyo just to help him transport a table is ridiculous and asking to be murdered.

The other choice he has is to ask his squad mates to man a fire truck just for a ten minute drive. But it’s completely unprofessional for him to use a work-related vehicle—Oh.

 _[Hey. Pick me up, I got us a coffee table_ ,] Taiga taps into his phone, before hitting the send button.

There are still people walking around just before midnight, most of them shooting him an odd look as he stands at the street curb, supporting the square table on its side.

Not a moment later, Taiga’s phone vibrates with the name _Aho_ on the call screen and a text. _[Did you steal it from somewhere?_ ]

 _[Why the fuck are you asking me that. No, I got it from the station,]_ Taiga snorts and then sends it back.

 _[Give me two minutes,]_ it says, and Taiga slips the phone into his bag and waits.

It feels like more than two minutes by the time Aomine rolls up close to the curb in a white police car, half-dipped in black.

When Taiga idly peers into the slightly tinted windows, he sees someone else in the back-seat of the car, a scrappy looking kid with a band-aid near the frown on his lips.

Taiga gives Aomine a point-blank look. “What did we say about letting kids into the apartment—”

“I’m just taking him back to his place,” Aomine says in defense, and shoves the table into the trunk, making it barely fit even when it hardly can.

Conversation in the car is one-sided as Aomine is lecturing the ear off the poor kid (Yuu?) in the backseat, yabbering about the importance of bedtimes and dangers of roaming around during the night.

But the preteen is sulking in the backseat, mumbling something about _fucking stupid cops_ under his breath. (Aomine is an ignorant block, so he doesn’t hear it, but Taiga does. He bites down on his lips and pretends to be stone-faced the entire ride through.)

Aomine drops Taiga off first since the kid lives another twenty minutes away, which is a shame since Taiga didn’t want to man-handle the coffee table up the stairs himself, irritating with all the sharp corners and edges bumping into the rails and scraping against the walls.

But after ten minutes of struggling, the coffee table is fit snugly in the middle of their living room replacing their poorly, misused cardboard box.

(Taiga rolls onto his back, tired from the workout and faintly remembers the vibration of his phone he felt in his bag shortly before Aomine arrived.

When he checks it, it’s unread message from Aomine, sent minutes after Taiga’s last text.

[ _www, you look stupid squatting with that table])_

—

(It probably started during the second year of high school, when they were roommates for the summer because of a honest miscalculation when Touou and Seirin booked the same inn at the same time.

Both stubborn, the coaches refused to pass up a prime training spot so close to the beach, so accommodations had to be made. Lots were drawn, Kagami and Aomine were to room together, no exchanges, no arguments allowed.

The inn was a run down, old place to be honest.

There were holes in the ceilings and the windows could barely slide more than three inches wide, but somehow, someway on the first night, Kagami and Daiki get into a yelling match over who gets to park their futon closest to the window—for the ocean breeze.

The following summer nights, they would fight over the fact that Daiki would leave his newly washed laundry on the floor instead of picking up after himself, or that Kagami would use up all the hot water in their shared bathroom.

Which, when you consider how much the two are always fighting, either on court or off the court, during meals and stealing fried beef slices from each other’s bowls, you’d wonder how they still put up with each other and haven’t thought of murdering the other in his sleep yet.

Except in the morning afters, Kagami would have folded Daiki’s laundry and set them aside on his futon and Daiki would let him take the shower first thing after their morning jogs. And at nights, they’d just sprawl all over the tatami mats and fall asleep like that, too exhausted from training to even care about whose futons is whose.

At a beachside inn, under a flimsy bedsheet on a lazy Saturday morning, Kagami kicked into Daiki’s leg in his sleep.

This is how it started.)

—

Daiki hears it from Tetsu first, on the way back from Maji’s, with a warm, half-eaten burger in his hand.

_Did you know, Kagami-kun is moving back to the states?_

It was raining earlier in the afternoon, the mist still hanging heavily in the air. Autumn air creeps up his hand and invades his warm clothes. Daiki stills the shake in his arm, tears his eyes away from the dripping teriyaki sauce. _What?_

 _Kagami-kun is moving back to the states. For a sports scholarship,_ Tetsu repeats slowly. His eyes widen a fraction at the revelation they’ve come to share, and before he asks, Daiki interrupts, throat closing up, hurts to breathe—

_No. I didn’t. He didn’t tell me._

—

(See, Daiki was a stupid kid who only had his mind on basketball for the first fifteen years of his life, before some boisterous redhead bulldozed into his everydays, tore down the walls he’s built, and three years have passed, becoming a blur of eating meals, sleeping over, and playing ball.

He’s not entirely sure what it is.

If he saw Kagami just like any other person—like maybe Tetsu or Kise—Daiki wouldn’t be this angry, conflicted, annoyed that Kagami would be leaving for a new life, a new life _without_ him.

 _Obviously, you see him more than a friend,_ Satsuki tells him with a knowing smile and pokes a finger between his worried brows.

He doesn’t get it.

She taps her chin. _Well,_ _if he got a girlfriend over there, how would you feel?_

 _Kagami_ can’t _have a girlfriend,_ Daiki snaps, vehemently, because that idiot loves basketball too much, loves eating a lot, loves spending the day with _him_ to even care about having one—

_Do you get it now?_

He still doesn’t. )

—

This is how it ends:

Kagami invites him over on a Sunday.

The evening is sprinkled with light showers and gusting winds, and Daiki wears two thin sweaters and a heavy wind breaker just to trod through the cold to get to Kagami’s house with plastic bag of hot, curry buns from the bakery shop that’s a block away from his house.

Daiki has come to learn that Kagami never locks his door when he’s expecting visitors, and he’s been over enough times to forego any kind of polite door-knocking customs.

When he enters, the apartment is quiet and dim. There’s only the light in the kitchen and the rich aroma of fried rice.

Daiki carefully sheds his wet shoes and his extra layers before he sets the bag of bread on the low coffee table and peeks around.

It’s uncomfortably warm, the heater is turned on and droning in the vent above the TV. Glancing further around, he sees a light streaking down the dark halls, from Kagami’s room.

When Daiki knocks and then opens the door, Kagami is pacing around, phone to his ear and speaking some sort of English.

He notices him briefly, waves at him before continuing. Daiki knows enough to pick up on, _excuse me, I understand, thank you very much._

“What was that?” Daiki asks when Kagami finally hangs up and tosses the phone onto his bed.

“Nothing,” Kagami says, dismissive. But Daiki knows him long enough to recognize the stiffness in his shoulders, and the tired lines under his eyes, as if there’s a weight of a secret pressing down at him, and ever since Tetsu told him—it might be that, just _that_.

Daiki would never admit it, but he loves these Sunday evenings, when Kagami has his sweater sleeves folded to his elbows and the ring on his necklace dangling when he ducks low to set dishes and utensils on the coffee table.

Kagami always has a delicate touch when he plates the baked chicken atop the fried rice, but he’ll always have a few specks of rice littering the edges that Daiki picks at and eats before he digs in.

But this evening, he spills more than he usually does, gives Daiki more than what he usually can eat, and Daiki _knows_ what’s bothering him. It’s that. Has to be that.

On his way there, Aomine had thought of all the various ways in which Kagami would come around to tell him the news. And he also thought of all the possible ways he’d react—-but things rarely play out the way they do.

“I…received a scholarship a few months ago,” Kagami starts slowly, setting his chopsticks against a half-eaten mountain of fried rice.

He doesn’t look at Daiki, doesn’t bother to see how Daiki grips his chopsticks and how his mouth is drawn into a thin line.

Daiki _knows_. It’s not news to him, he _knows._ But it doesn’t make it easier to hear it from him directly.

“I’ve heard,” Daiki manages to say and breathes, in and out, carefully, because there’s a hard lump in his throat, choking him slowly. He says nothing else (can’t say anything else) and they finish eating in a collective silence.

(At the door, Kagami has a hand on the wall and watches Daiki slip his damp-socked feet back into his sneakers.

“See you after practice tomorrow then?” Kagami asks, not entirely looking at him. Daiki nods in agreement, mind heavy, breath shallow.

He stands up to leave, but _hesitates_ —mind heavy— _you see him more than a friend—_

Without thinking, he grabs Kagami’s arm, pulling him into a crushing embrace, and he blurts, “I—see you more than a friend, and I think—”

Everything comes to a staggering halt, as he realizes—the soft curve of Kagami's neck against his cheek, the faint soap wafting from his shirt, the warmth of Kagami's chest against his—the world starts up again, and something in his mind snaps.

What is he doing.

_What the hell is he doing._

Daiki lets go, looks at the floor and rubs the back of his head. He laughs. (It hurts; air scalding his lungs, his stomach clenches down with a crushing pressure.) “—never mind. I was kidding, just…forget I said anything.”

He hears a sharp inhale of breath, but quirks a crooked grin, doesn’t look Kagami, and turns on his heels to leave.

 _Fucking coward,_ he hears himself say, but what can he do?

What can he do?)

—

Every meeting becomes more painful than the last, now that he knows Kagami is leaving in the middle of spring.

Daiki would be distracted every time he breaks free from Kagami’s screens and dunks a little harder than he should.

He’d chew and eat quietly, maybe force a laugh at the crumbs on Kagami’s chin and the wrappers piling up like a toppling orange pyramid.

But somewhere in the back of his mind, he’s counting. Daiki is waiting, wishing, hoping, dreading for an answer, a reply that won’t ever come.

The remaining days pass on like how they usually do.

Daiki lets that awkward Sunday bury itself over time, under dwindling basketball one-on-one’s and outings at Maji Burgers.

So, it’s not startling when somewhere along the months, Kagami stops inviting him over for dinners on Sunday, and Daiki is too tired, too exhausted to chase him down for a quick game of street ball.

 _I’m busy_ , Kagami says over the phone when Daiki decides to call over the weekend, his voice sounding brittle from the poor reception.

 _There’s something I have to do,_ Daiki says for the next weekend, when he absolutely _does not_ have anything planned that day, and he’d just lie, spread-eagle on his bed with the comforter under his back too warm, too sticky.

He doesn’t try to think about it, but there’s a whispering in the back of his head saying, _something’s changed, something’s different_ , but he ignores it.

—

 _I like you,_ Daiki doesn’t say, when he doesn’t show up at the airport terminal, hands jammed in his pockets and hiding a (stupid, sentimental) basketball phone strap memento he’s bought on his way there with Satsuki.

 _I’ll miss you,_ Kagami won’t ever say, with a stupid grin and a promise that in a few years he’ll come back, play in the BJ leagues, on opposing teams, but together on court like all the after school one-on-one’s and official high school tournaments.

 _You should call him_ , Tetsu _does_ say a month later at Maji’s—at a table that’s too empty, with too many burgers for Daiki to eat and no one to have the leftovers—and slides him a piece of paper with a number, starting with 010.

 _I should_ , Aomine lies and tucks the piece of paper somewhere into his jeans, where it’ll sit, crumpled, washed, and dried for many months later, until he turns his pockets inside out for extra coins to buy a pocari drink and toss the paper away without a second thought.

 _Coward,_ he hears Tetsu’s gaze say, but Daiki is afraid—scared of _something_ and it pisses him off when he can’t understand why.

—

 _I’ll get over it,_ Aomine tells himself in the mirror, even though he looks completely unconvinced.

There are worried lines on his forehead and a strained upward twitch of a mouth for a smile.

Because apparently, the more you keep telling yourself, the more you’ll start to believe it.

Time mends over all things, no matter how ugly.

So, he just dusts his fingers of the past, grapples a ball, and plays like the monster he is for Yokohama B-Corsairs, smashes their biggest rivals, the Tokyo Cinq Rêves, intent on drowning himself out—in the short burst of fame and fortune—until he _forgets._

(But forgetting is always so, so hard.

And even against pros, nothing feels quite the same as the one-on-one’s under broken street lamps, and the time spent afterwards, just laughing and grinning at each other with mouths full of greasy burgers—

It bothers him, the distant memory, acting as a bitter reminder of what he should’ve, could’ve said and done, instead.)

—

Five years passed since then.

After spending a year at the police academy, three months in fieldwork, and then another month training while sharing a dorm with other rookies with a curfew at eleven, Daiki becomes a cop.

He’s assigned to patrol the streets in a car with a broken air conditioner, deal with screeching mothers who yell at the kids he escorts back to their homes, and confiscate bottles of beers and packets of cigarettes from punks not the age they claim they are.

For the record, Daiki _hates_ kids, but he deals with juveniles anyways, and days pass by with reports crackling from his headset and the stifling heat or lack of during the seasons, while sitting in the car parked off at the side of the road.

(Daiki really believed he had forgotten about it.

About this—just some guy from high school who he happened to be friends with after losing a match at some high school tournament.

He’s too busy to think, or remember (for the matter,) about some _stupid_ _something_ from so many years back that he’s been too scared to confess of.

But then he gets a text from Shin and his perfect world shatters.

Everything comes racing back—the memories, the bittersweet taste in his mouth and wrenching pain in his gut—and he’s terrified all over again, now for completely different reasons.

 _[I thought I should let you know. Kagami is in the hospital. You need to see him.]_ )

—

They sleep on the floor for the first two weeks, because no matter how much they talked about buying beds—they never actually got around to buying a bed.

But there’s a pattern that Daiki recognizes after the fifth week rolls by.

They have three days that match up, but most of the time had been spent on sleeping in, watching tv, or heading down to the court for street ball games.

But their usual sleeping arrangements are like this:

Kagami had decided to take the low, coffee table in the middle of the living room and use it as a bed. He’d sleep sometimes, head on the table cushioned by a pillow, or sprawled against the hardwood floor with sheets blanketing his sides because it’s the middle of June, and heat creeps in through the windows.

Daiki gets the room inside, but he hardly stays in there.

He’d bury himself in a fort of (Kagami’s) pillows with the TV blaring NBA games, watching an entire season crammed into back-to-back games for hours until he passes out.

It’s not uncomfortable per se.

After all, being a cop has trained him to survive in the toughest situations; he can power-nap almost anywhere with an ear peeled for noises and he has the endurance to withstand the most uncomfortable job placements—but this is just too much.

He’s supposed to be living like he’s in the comforts of his house, _not_ in some kind of patrol duty.

“We need to buy _something_ at least, I’m going to crack my spine on this fucking floor,” Daiki complains, mouthing into the magazine cover over his face.

Lazy Friday morning, they’re lying uselessly on the floor. Earlier, Daiki had opened the balcony window open to invite a cool breeze in, but the summer heat continued to boil them like dried fish.

“Yeah, maybe,” Kagami hums absently, wiping a stray strand of hair away from his eyes, too engrossed in reading American sports articles from Daiki’s laptop.

“Let’s go to the mall.”

Another tap as Kagami’s fingers hit the keys, a disinterested grunt; he’s clearly not paying attention. “What’s at the mall.”

“I don’t know,” Daiki says and rolls over onto his back; he can count the streaks of sunlight filtering in from their near-translucent curtains. “ _A bed?_ ”

Another disinterested tap, and Daiki turns his head to look at him. Like a cat sprawled on his stomach, Kagami has his legs kicked up and swinging idly in the air. He looks too comfortable to move.

Daiki grunts as he rolls again, once, twice, until he’s nestled into Kagami’s side and peers over (upside-down) at whatever the hell he’s reading.

He sees English and makes a face at it.

If he squinted hard enough, he could make out some words: _ball, NBA, the, a, is, Friday._ (English had been a requirement for police academy, but Daiki never had a reason to pursue it seriously once he passed the exams.)

“Kagami,” he says, just to try it once. There isn’t an answer and he furrows his brows at the lack of response. “Kagami-kun.”

The cursor floats to a link, clicks, and a page with some pictures of basketball athletes appear on the screen. Daiki blinks again, tries to remember the soft, mild tone that Tetsu addresses him with—“Taiga-kun.”

Kagami purses his lips, remains blank-faced,  but Daiki can see that he’s visibly irritated with the mild twitch in his fingers on the touchpad.

“Yes, _Aomine-kun_?”

“Let’s buy a futon, or a bed. Whichever’s cheaper,” he says and rolls right back over.

Kagami still isn’t paying attention but when does that guy _never_ have a one-tracked mind? “We also need a fridge, some shelves, a closet, other things—”

“Do we have enough money for all that though?” Kagami interrupts as he reaches his hands to the keyboard, and click-clacks something in English. “We don’t really need a fridge—”

Daiki lies on his back and feels the laziness seeping into his bones. Kagami closes the laptop shut and unplugs the charger. “I’m fine with takeout and buying groceries the day of, but if we can keep leftovers, it’ll be more convenient that way.”

Kagami gathers himself up from the floor, stretching and listening to his stiff joints crack. He brushes a hand to the back of his neck, squeezes the muscles there once before he stalks off to the room, probably for a change of clothes.

“Fine, we’ll get a fridge. But you’re cooking for yourself.”

“Right,” Daiki says dryly as Kagami retreats down to the bedroom down the hall.

—

Their budget is 500,000 yen.

Unfortunately, It’s not a work day so Daiki doesn’t get to borrow the police bike to jet their way to the department store.

Instead, they spend a good half an hour or more getting _lost_ because Daiki only knows the way there by car, not train, and they often missed the stop and took the wrong line somewhere else.

Kagami had spent the entire ride grumbling under his breath about it. He’d glare Daiki down with a menacing _this is a waste of my time_ look every so often with his arms folded over his chest, but he does shut up once they get there.

Daiki has heard things from people, mainly Shin and second-hand information from Atsushi, about how there was a period of time when Kagami never bothered to venture past familiar places.

He’s like a caveman that needs to readjust to civilized society, Shin once (fondly) said.

Surely, Shin had to be joking because everyone and their mom should have been to the mall at least once in the last few years.

“Did they recently renovate?” Kagami had asked, almost _floating_ across the tiles of the department store, fluttering from one window to another in some kind of star-struck awe.

It’s old news that the department had renovated five years ago.

So Shin’s right. Kagami  _is_ a caveman, making small comments about how this or that has changed.

Daiki scoffs a bit.

It’s funny in a way because he hasn’t seen that guy act like the over-enthusiastic idiot he used to be for _ages—_ ( _coward_ , something whispers like an old, ten year grudge. _No, no, I don’t feel that way anymore._ )

“This way,” Daiki says after a cough and grabs Kagami by the back of his shirt, pulling him away from the shoe store.

Kagami bats his hand away with a huff, and follows obediently, a slight bounce in his step. His attention skitters away to the hustle and bustle of the crowds around.

—

There _isn’t_ anything special about this outing, they’re only here to buy furniture, and Daiki really should stop thinking about trivial things from the past—

(Even when:

  1. they’re walking side-by-side, shoulders occasionally touching, opening and closing fridge doors, discussing in low voices about the prices like a secret people shouldn’t overhear;  
  

  2. Kagami grabs him by the sleeve of his shirt and leads him away to take a look at a space-saving magazine rack they should have to sort all their basketball monthlies (and the occasional “porn”— _not porn_ magazines.)  
  

  3. they get into a small squabble by the information desk about what types of shelves/drawers they should have, whether it should be sliding or ones with doors;  
  

  4. the saleslady automatically assumes the two of them are a packaged deal and politely informs them there’s a discount if they pre-order this particular set of loveseats (which Daiki vehemently opposes, both to the assumption _and_ the sofa)  
  

  5. Kagami grabs him by the hand, fingers tightly curled around his, and pulls him _back_ to the sales lady to ask about the loveseats, because they’re going to get a sofa _no matter what._ (“Discounts are discounts, dumbass, why are you passing this up?”)



And then— (something that Daiki had vaguely understood and had buried years and years ago, a dark secret in the corner of his mind, only to be dredged out and exposed raw) an odd warmth blooming in the middle of his chest, making its way to the edges of his frown. 

Daiki _needs_ to stop thinking.

—

After making the initial payment for the fridge and sofa, and arranging store-provided transportation for shelves and other things, Daiki came to the realization that they splurged on everything but a _bed._

Which defeated the entire purpose of furniture shopping, because while having a fridge and shelves, magazine racks and drawers are nice and all, without a bed, he’ll be sleeping on the floors for another week, and he can’t have that.

Daiki’s too old for that.

“Are you fucking serious,” Daiki says when he opens the wallet and Kagami’s attention turns away from the bubbling goop in lava lamps.

“What?”

“We only have this much left,” Daiki mutters and puts a hand on his head, because while he’s aware that the fridge and sofa are on a five-month, bi-monthly payment plan, he hadn’t counted for the rest of the items to have depleted most of their budget.

“Ten thousand, not enough for a good futon, I think.”

“A futon?” Kagami repeats, raising a forked brow.

“A good one,” Daiki replies glumly, before he catches a sign beside Kagami: _30% OFF ON ALL MATRESSES_ , and really, he can’t believe he’ll be suckered into buying something just because of a bargain, but— “Or, we can get that instead.”

Kagami follows his gaze and considers the sign for a few seconds with something like a cringe. “I…guess that works.”

—

Many years can change a person, both inside and out.

Shin, for example, has neatly cropped hair, bangs no longer curtaining the rim of his glasses, and if he had acted like he had a stick up his ass during high school, then he has a log jammed up there now.

Tetsu, for the most part, hadn’t changed; he still has that piercing gaze and quiet patience, but without those few creases under his eyes, he would have looked at least ten years younger.

But Kagami—is an entirely different person.

Daiki could hardly recognize him, if it isn’t for the same whirl of thick, dusty red hair framing his odder than weird eyebrows. Kagami has developed more muscles in his arms and lost some of the awkward gangliness in his bones; his movements are more precise, less clumsy, an expert in his own skin.

But then, there’s a strange fragility about him that Daiki was sure that was never there before.

Kagami is—thin.

He doesn’t eat as much, he doesn’t sleep as well.

He tries to hide it behind the junk food he eats and the orange-pill boxes stacking up in his drawers, but it’s there in the heavy bags under his eyes and the perpetual dozing into space, eyes hooded and dull, staring and waiting for something he doesn’t know how to explain.

He’s tired, so tired.

If Kagami was bent, he’d be sure to snap into broken glass and raw anger. There’s an air around him; a cold, unwelcoming aura, guarding against Daiki whenever he tried to get close, closer.

It’s obvious.

Daiki _knows_ —but doesn’t know at the same time.

(Daiki is not accustomed to deep sleep—of closing his eyes, drifting away, and reassuming reality when they open.

He sleeps in pieces, floating into consciousness and out of it, still mindful of the wind blowing softly through their screened balcony and the faint cool nip of air against his bare shoulders.

Sometimes, more often than not, he hears the uneven hiccups in Kagami’s breath, the soft sobs that shake his shoulders, and Daiki would wake up and press a hand to Kagami’s head, comb back his damp hair, soothe him with a touch between his back, but Kagami would continue trembling at dreams he most probably won’t remember in the morning.)

—

“Every other day, you take the floor,” he hears Kagami say.

There’s a squeak and alcoholic smell of a permanent sharpie running down a calendar, one that they managed to nab at a store for free.

Daiki tilts his head back from the stack of pillows he’s put under his shoulders, hand still clutching the sides of a gravure magazine.

He watches Kagami twist the cap back on. He grabs for another marker. It’s blue.

“…then who gets the bed on Sunday?”

“Whoever gets in it first, obviously,” Kagami says, and gives a satisfied grunt as he finishes a blue line.

The calendar is now streaks of color; Daiki sees a red line running down Tuesday, Thursday, and Fridays.

“Sounds fair,” Daiki sighs lazily as he turns another page, eyes tracing down the curve of Mai-chan’s nape.

“Of course it is.”

Daiki pauses for a while, thinking, before he asks, “…what day is it, Bakagami?”

There’s a clack as Kagami tosses the pens onto the floor, and a flap of paper as he holds the calendar up to marvel at it.

“It’s Friday.”

“Oh, let me have Friday.”

He hears an annoyed grunt somewhere vaguely to his right.

“…Does it even matter?”

“It does.” Daiki strains to give him a puppy-eyed look—(grown men shouldn’t puppy-eye but Atsushi always said it’d work if he tried hard enough.) “My back hurts.”

Kagami gives him a long stare before he glances back at the calendar, at the thick red and blue lines running down each column of days.

Predictably, Kagami’s too much of a good guy to refuse.

Kagami grabs the red marker again and yanks the cap off with much more force than usual.

Daiki hides a grin behind his magazine, but not without hearing Kagami hiss.

“Fuck you.”


	3. Chapter 3

Daiki was always a morning person, no matter how hard he tried to not be.

Since middle school, he's been drilled to wake up early in the mornings for the routine jog, and if he didn't Sei would certainly have his head lopped off because how dare he, the ace of Teikou, not train himself.

And although he had gotten lazy during the last few years of middle school and the first year of high school, his body naturally zombied him out of bed and ran himself to the convenience store half an hour away where he often helped the nice old lady that owned the grocery booth.

He's _tried_ to sleep in, but the latest he's woken up was ten in the morning, and that was when he forced himself to stay in bed even though his back was sticky with summer sweat and the sunlight seared into his skin through an open slit between his curtains, telling him to _get up._

Fast forward ten years later, he still gets up at the crack of dawn.

—

Sunday morning, Daiki wakes up to the buzz of a cicada perched noisily on the window sill.

It was another humid night that he had spent tossing and turning on the floor.

The fan they had bought did nothing but blow hot air around, and amidst the light sleep he had, he’s gotten himself tangled up in a frustrated mess of sheets.

He wrestles himself free and sits up, glancing around at the spectacularly empty room, and then looks at huge cardboard box propped against the wall.

A day immediately after their purchase, the store had delivered their furniture to their apartment.

There wasn’t much problem in navigating them up the stairs, aside from miscommunication on which way to turn, or how to hold the boxes, which resulted in a lot of cussing and a stubbed toe.

But the fridge had been installed immediately after, and Kagami had put a pack of thawing chicken and bag of lettuce in it. The mattress had been dragged out of its box, but the wooden frames sit near the corner since they’ve already worn themselves tired.

Saturday night was Kagami’s, and the night passed in silence without one of his odd nightmares haunting him. Either he must have been very tired or the bed was just that comfortable, but the sleep he had was deep and undisturbed.

Daiki stares at the weird form of burrito lying on the twin mattress like dead weight, with only a tuft of red hair sticking out at the top, and with a huff, he quietly leaves Kagami to sleep on his own, stalking off to the bathroom for a quick shower.

—

So, this is what he does that morning:

Daiki finishes his shower and changes into a loose, blue-knit shirt, half-tucked into his black jeans.

With a cooling cup of coffee, he tosses a foil-wrapped garlic bun into the oven and eats it after five minutes, careful not to burn his fingers on the toasty bread and mindful of the crumbs he’s leaving on the counter top.

Before he leaves the apartment, he tosses another foil-wrapped lump into the oven and scrawls on a nearby piece of paper.

 _Bread’s in the oven, make sure you eat it. Text if you need anything._ _I’ll be back later._

It’s seven in the morning by the time he’s out the door and he roams the familiar streets by foot, breathing in the stifling air and avoiding the children that weave around him on their race to the playground.

It’s another twenty minute walk until he’s out of the residential neighborhood and into a semblance of a busy street.

Muscle memory brings him to the bakery he’s come to bother much too often.  

The small shop is a quiet place. A hole in the wall, wedged between two business buildings on a crowded street, looking entirely out of place with its gentle, vanilla impression and lavender window frames.

Vinyl words of _Umai Mura_ are neatly printed on the window and behind the glass are self-serve display cases, filled with steaming, assortment of bread kept warm by the lamp hanging over it.

A bell jingles overhead when Daiki pushes the door carefully and a waft of sweet bread and sugary confectionery greets him.

There aren’t much people on the streets, but considering that it was a Sunday morning, he’s not surprised.

There had been a customer he sidestepped on his way in but for the most part the shop is empty. At the front, Atsushi is absorbed in placing the cooling trays onto the standing racks behind him.

Ten years ago, it’d be hard for anyone to imagine that he and the lazy man would become something like the best of friends.

But now, Daiki comes here during the waning hours of the morning, just to nab a quick breakfast or bathe in the warm atmosphere, chat a little with the baker while sipping on hot coffee and watch him carefully sort freshly made bread into the glass display.

“Morning,” Daiki says with a slight yawn, pocketing his hands into his jeans. There’s a clatter as Atsushi sets down a tray onto the glass counter, eyes slowly glancing up.

“Eh, Minechin? You’re up early,” he drones gently as Daiki leans over the warm glass, staring down at the stacks and stacks of bread, from creme-filled to those with chocolate oozing across its top. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah, figured I had time today. I’ve been caught up in things, sorry about that.”

“It’s fine, I heard from Tatsuchin,” Atsushi says slowly, concentrated on fixing the small price stands in the display. “So after pining for some months, you finally moved in with Gamichin—”

“Quit calling him that, it’s weird as hell,” Daiki mumbles. “But yeah, nothing really special to it. We half rent, have a shared wallet, and we have different schedules. I don’t see him that often.”

“Ah, sounds nice,” Atsushi says in that lazy, gentle hum as he picks up a small plastic bag and grabs for the tongs. “I heard from Tatsuchin that Gamichin is looking a lot livelier, eating less junk food, he says. It’s a good thing Minechin moved in, ne?”

Daiki scoffs loudly to the side, ignoring the flare of heat across his face. “It’s ridiculous if you think I’ll just live off ramen bowls like him.”

“Domestic bliss, I think that’s what Tatsuchin called it,” he muses and picks up some sweet bread, lightly caked with coconut flakes; Daiki watches him carefully place it into a small box. “Says that it’ll do good for the both of you, ‘cus Gamichin hasn’t had someone to take care of in a long time— ”

“ _Oi_ , who the hell needs taking care of?” Daiki grumbles under his breath, leaning heavily onto the glass counter. “ _He’s_ the guy who still sleeps on the floor—”

“Hnm? Minechin’s clothes aren’t as crumpled as always. Did you fold it—or did Gamichin do it for you?” Atsushi asks with a smile. Daiki blinks furiously before he looks down at his shirt and back up.

Atsushi doesn’t bother to meet his gaze as he packs other types of buns—garlic tuna, ham and cheese, and then curry bread—into the box before putting it in a floral, plastic bag—however, there’s a tiny quirk at the corner of his lip, one that he usually wears when he’s being especially immature.

Daiki flushes. “That has nothing to do with—”

“I think it’s nice,” he interrupts and plops the small box in front of him. “Minechin won’t be single forever~”

“What the hell are you talking about,” Daiki hisses with a frown. “I _have_ a girlfriend if you forgot—”

“Tatsuchin said she broke up with Minechin again,” he muses, tilting a head and feigning wonderment; it irritates him off. “Said Minechin became a mad drunk one night because of something she said—”

“All right, the whole thing with your second-hand information is creeping me out,” Daiki interrupts and slaps a thousand yen bill on the counter, knowing full well that Atsushi will never accept his money.

It makes Daiki feel a bit better about mooching off a friend, for all the bread he’s taken and eaten over the years, though Atsushi was always the type who didn’t care about counting yen notes and favors.

“We only talk, nothing else,” Atsushi says lightly, folding the bill neatly in half, and then another half. He slides it back toward Daiki’s elbow.

“Yeah, right,” Daiki scoffs, barely hiding a grin. He latches his fingers around the plastic bag and yanks it off the counter, leaving the bill behind.

—

After spending four years in Minato, Daiki most of the prefecture committed to memory, knowing the dips and turns of the streets like veins running along the back of his hands.

There are new, modern skyscrapers and well-worn buildings alike, coexisting and packed together down the same road like a can of sardines.

At rush hours it’s flooded with crowds of people, walking down sidewalks like waves.  

Between the alleys of old buildings and in murky, dead-ends, there are kids mixing into the crowd of hoodlums and gangs.

Japan is a very safe country, but it doesn't stop juvenile delinquency from steadily climbing throughout the year. It's a getaway of sort, from the pressures of school and expectations from parents.

And among the districts of Minato, Shiba has the highest rate.

Relocating a part of the police force isn't something unheard of.

Daiki has been shuffled around districts before, but being sent to Shiba had been two years recent, and it’s been all kinds of hell re-familiarizing himself with where the popular hangouts are or how to deal with pretentious little brats.

In Shiba, recreational parks with courts and playgrounds dot the corner of every tenth block, and the one farthest from the city-side (and the one that happened to be the closest to their apartment now) is littered with ill-tempered kids from nearby schools.

Recently, the playground and basketball courts had been re-furnished, restoring the bent monkeybars and rusting chain-link fences. But Daiki wouldn’t be surprised, if in another year, the park air becomes fouled by cigarette smoke and the walls sprayed with graffiti.

On most weekend mornings and weekday nights, there’s always a band of brats gathered at the courts in basketball shorts and tanktops, playing ball, and then smoking and drinking right afterwards into the late hours.

Loud(most of the times,) uncouth, and very, _very_ overbearing, the band of kids are irritating, little shits that he had come to recognize after the third month of constantly confiscating their things and punting them home.

And in turn, they’d flip the finger at him, swear at him with profanities their moms would _love_ to hear. One even tried to punch him and Daiki _floored_ the kid (mostly out of reflex) and nearly wrenched the boy’s arm from his socket.

He was sure he’d get hated even more after that but—

“Yo, Daiki!”

Something bright orange rams hard into his side, knocking him off kilter from his peaceful stroll down the sidewalk. He winces at the smarting sting and glances down—a basketball dribbles slowly to a stop.

When he bends over to scoop it up, he sees a pair of frayed, dirty sneakers step into his view. “Pst, hey, you got the goods?”

Daiki growls as he straightens himself up. Yuu (Yuuichiro) is barely half his height, then again, most of the Japanese populace are rarely as tall as he is.

“Don’t say it like it’s something illegal, dumb brat,” Daiki says and shoves the box of bread into the boy’s hands. Daiki watches him fumble and dig through the bag like a starved animal, and he instantly feels sorry for Atsushi who had taken care to packaging it nicely. “Are you the only one here? Where’s the others?”

“Mmfghh,” Yuu says through a mouthful of sweet, coconut bread, and Daiki ruffles the boy’s bedhead as he brushes past him, and heads toward the street court.

“Swallow first, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

He hears the rustle of plastic as the middle-schooler follows him. “We’re joinin’ the streetball tournament today, didn’tcha hear?”

Daiki pauses just for a moment. “A tournament?”

“Yea, I thought Katsuki told ya?” Daiki feels an elbow nudge into his arm, incessantly, almost ticklish, before he feels small, sweaty hands nab at the crook of his elbow and _yank_ him the other way, back in the direction he was coming from. “You’re joinin’ us.”

“Hey, _hey_ ,” Daiki manages to shake him off, but follows him anyways. It sounds interesting and he has the entirety of Sunday to kill time. “They _disqualified_ me the last time I played—”

“Yea, but we’re a man short,” Yuu explains before combing at his whirl of brunette (birdnest) hair. “Oda’s at school ‘cus his teacher caught him cheatin’, fucking idiot—”

Daiki hits him across the head. “Watch your language, punk.”

“Damn cop,” Yuu spits, but not without a toothy grin and a light punch into Daiki’s arm.  

—

Satoru, the tallest in the group, is the first to greet them since the other two wandered off to stalk their potential opponents. In his hands, he has a pair of black shades and a blue cap, which he hurriedly goes to smash onto Daiki’s face the moment he sees him.

“This should do it,” he huffs, fixing the hat low over Daiki’s eyes as Yuu continues to chomp down on a curry bread just off to the side. “No one’s gonna recognize you now.”

“Right,” Daiki says dryly, unconvinced.

Even if he completely hid his face and hair, once he puts his hand on the ball, anybody would know he’s _Aomine Daiki—_ the legendary, ex-power forward for Yokohama B-Corsairs.

While there is no age limit on who can participate in the street tournaments, naturally it’s in the rules that professional athletes can’t play in the games. (Which is complete bullshit if you asked him. Daiki hasn’t played professionally for _six_ years.)

A grand prize for an all-you-can-eat weekend pass to Maji Burgers seems like such a small thing for all the effort it’ll take to sneak him into the tournament.

“Don’t worry man, we gotcha,” Yuu says, not so reassuringly, and slaps Daiki hard on the back. He frowns at the sting. “We’re gonna get that burger pass no matter what.”

 _I’m not exactly worried_ , Daiki thinks tiredly, as he glances past the high schoolers and at the assembling masses. He doesn’t recognize anybody—most of them being teenagers or young adults, some look his age too—but he does recognize some jersey bags hanging off the shoulder among the crowd.

Shuutoku, Touou, and even Seirin—it’s not a surprise that a streetball tournament would lure teams from Tokyo’s three basketball powerhouses.

“Oh, by the way, where’s the angry eyebrows guy Katsuki was talking about?” Satoru asks. Daiki glances at him, confused. Angry eyebrow guy?—oh right, _Kagami._ “Didn’t he tell you to bring him?”

Daiki grimaces a little—Kagami is the last person he’d want to meet this group of kids. Katsuki is decent, well-mannered, got along tolerably with Kagami during that streetball game, but.

He’s pretty sure Kagami would blow a short fuse at how obnoxious the rest of them are. (Not to mention, they were pretty much the reason why Daiki was kicked out of his old apartment in the first place.)

“That fucker never tells Daiki anythin’,” Yuu interrupts—he’s _finally_ stopped eating through all the bread, and squished the box into a ball. He aims it toward a nearby trash can. “We’re startin’ at nine, I think.”

Daiki watches the trash bounce and fall to the ground. He grumbles before he walks over to fetch it.

—

(Basketball is in his nature, runs through his blood, and Daiki instinctively plays too hard even when he’s consciously trying to take it down a couple of notches.

Daiki does pass the ball to the other four, who are halfway decent for kids their age, but for the most part, he carefully maintains a believable score between the opponents and the _Ball Busters_ (who the fuck _calls_ themselves that?)

People do side-eye him however and he can feel their intense gaze, as if they're trying to figure out where they've seen him before, whether on TV, magazines, on court—or they’re wondering why he’s playing with shades over his eyes, but for the most part, Daiki just tips his head down and pulls on his hat, and prays no one comes up to hassle him about his plays.

So they win the tournament by a hair’s breadth without the announcer interrupting their game by declaring that Daiki’s a professional and that the _Ball Busters_ (fucking embarrassing) are disqualified.

It’s already late in the afternoon by the time Daiki parts ways with them, after warning them off from eating too much and getting too sick.

As he heads home, he stares down at a glossy all-you-can-eat burger pass and wonders what the hell he’d do with it before he remembers _angry eyebrows man_ —and laughs.

—

[4:11 pm: Hey, wanna eat at Maji’s, my treat?]

[4:15 pm: ...did you help out maji’s manager too?]

[4:16 pm: what the fuck lol, no. I got a pass. all you can eat. meet me there now?]

[4:20 pm: hholf on give me a minyte. cab you get mr somethinf ok you know what ill call you]

Daiki barely finishes reading the text before his phone vibrates with an incoming call. He swipes at the screen and holds it up to his ear. “...er...hello?”

He hears background thumps and hisses just as Kagami’s voice swims into focus, it’s still brittle over the static, probably on speaker.

 _“Sorry, was fixing the shelf.”_ A clang of metal and then something sounding suspiciously like magazine books fluttering to a floor in an avalanche. _“Shit, shit, shit, I just put that there, ugh—”_

“What’s going on?” Daiki asks, raising an amused brow.

_“Okay, can you buy a screwdriver? I have the shelf together, but it’s gonna topple. Kind of hard to screw things on with just my fingers.”_

“Got it,” Daiki hums, idly kicking a stone lying in the middle of the sidewalk pavement. He glances around, there should be a small mini-mart somewhere around here. “A screwdriver and anything else?”

 _“Hm...nothing that comes to mind.”_ Another thump and then he hears Kagami breathe out slowly before his voice becomes clearer. _“Where’d you get the pass? They don’t hand those out to random people.”_

“They don’t. I was roped into a streetball tournament. The passes were the prizes for the winning team,” Daiki says with a quirk in his lips—roped was a relatively tamer term compared to _dragged off_ —and he can hear Kagami snort lightly.

_“Isn’t that an overkill? You against some kids?”_

Daiki hums and pauses at the curbside, glancing both ways for cars before he strolls across. “I held back.”

 _“Right. I’m sure you did._ ”

“You should join next time, it’ll be fun. We can get more passes that way.” He hears cloth rustling and footsteps thudding against the floor. There’s a silence as he hears a jingle of keys. “Are you heading out now?”

_“It’ll take me twenty minutes to get there. Are you buying the screw driver yet?”_

“Yeah, yeah. I’m going there,” Daiki snorts and spots the store just a few minutes away. He lightly quips, just because. “—nag.”

 _“Tch, Fuck off.”_ There’s a pause just as Daiki meanders up to the door and grapples the bar to pull it open. “ _...I’ll text you when I’m there?”_

“Mm,” Daiki walks inside and feels a rush of cold air in his face and the smell of warm bentos permeates the air of the convenience store. “I’ll see you then.”

—

Daiki hates kids.

They're arrogant, obnoxious, and think all adults are stupid.

It must be a teenager thing, testosterone raging turning respectable kids into monkeys—Daiki complained to Shin on a day a few weeks ago, when he dropped by in the middle of a work shift, looking completely normal save for a waterfall of blood running down his face.

(Which, okay, on second thought, looked _much_ worse than it felt, but the deep scowl on Shin’s face was brewing up a storm.)

“What happened?” Shin had asked in that curt way of his, after rudely throwing tissues at him and telling him to hold it down, apply pressure (as if Daiki already didn’t.)

He’s snapping on latex gloves just as Daiki rubs away blood from his eyes and smears it across his face. “They fucking tripped me and I hit my head on the ground.”

Which is _ridiculous_ because he’s a police officer with years of police academy training knit into his bones and fucking brats _still_ managed to roll a ball in front of him when he wasn’t looking.

Shin sucks in a tight breath before he hovers close and inspects his head, latex fingers pushing away some of his hair. “Are you feeling dizzy? Drowsy?”

“I don’t...think I have a concussion,” Daiki says and eyes a bright yellow duck sitting at the corner of his desk, next to his macbook. Daiki winces when Shin sticks something cold in his ear, “At least, it doesn’t feel like it.”

“It’s very unwise to drive yourself here when there was the possibility of fainting,” Shin says, clicking his tongue. He pulls away the otoscope and shines something bright and glaring into his eyes.

Daiki blinks rapidly a few times until Shin threatens him to keep still. “I didn’t drive, coworkers did. The brats thought they murdered me, so they phoned the cops from a payphone and ran away. Fucking idiots.”

Shin rips off his latex gloves and balls them up before he aims it (without looking) into the trash can.

“Upstairs, x-ray.”

“But—”

“Save me the trouble and get yourself checked,” Shin says, furrowing his brows and glaring down at the clipboard. “I’ve said it before, I’m _not_ your personal doctor, I have a patient waiting outside and you’re cutting into their appointment—”

“All right, all right, I’m going,” Daiki says quickly, jumping off from the examination table, successfully crinkling the pristine roll of paper layered on top of it.

When he leaves, Shin huffs indignantly, clicks his pen and returns back to work.

(Aomine gets a call right after he’s finished with the x-ray and he scrambles out of the room before the nurse gives him the permission to leave. He knows Shin will probably murder him later but there’s been a break-in at a jewelry boutique a block away from the hospital and the suspect is on the run.

So he ignores the yells after him and runs down the hall, barely dodging another nurse and a man with a pair of crutches, hobbling in the direction he was coming from.)

—

Ten, he’s counted, including the one that Kagami is eating in small, careful bites, occasionally thumbing at the corner of his lips to wipe off a dab of ketchup.

Nine wrappers, orange in color for Maji’s specialty cheeseburgers, are neatly folded into small squares and stacked absent-mindedly against the corner of the tray.

A long time ago, when they had been just high schoolers grabbing a late dinner after playing at the street court, Daiki would have had to order ten cheeseburgers and then a teriyaki burger, and carry the tray with him to the fifth table from the entrance.

They weren’t for him, obviously; but it had made more sense to order ten burgers separately rather than twenty all at once, even when Daiki had always grumbled about Kagami’s monstrous appetite.

“—Touou won the last Interhigh, kind of surprising.” Kagami finishes his last burger and carelessly crumples it into a greasy ball; he beams it at the stack and watches it fall over. “You’d think Rakuzan would maintain first place, but I think other schools definitely climbed ranks.”

“Ah, yeah,” Daiki says, not trying to stare at Kagami’s hands, just pinching and shredding the used napkin. He’s not entirely paying attention to what he’s saying—things about Touou and Seirin, the coaches who Daiki vaguely remembers.

(But high school basketball had been something of ten years past; he’s stopped keeping track of it years and years ago, and he wasn’t particularly too close with his coach to want to sit down for a chitchat and a pint of beer.)

“Riko is still there I think, doing her thing. They have a strong freshman this year, I heard,” Kagami says with a short laugh and then slurps his ice tea. Ten wrappers tossed onto his greasy tray and shredded napkins, surely that can’t be enough.

“Aren’t you...are you full?” Daiki asks suddenly, leaning back on his chair. He taps the cheap plastic card against the table; it’s been only ten burgers and Kagami is drinking away at his tea, making no move to get up and buy more or complain about not having enough.

Kagami makes a face, something cross between annoyance and confusion, “Yeah. Why do you ask?”

Daiki remembers overhearing Tetsu whispering to Himuro one night at the bar reunion, something about, _“He’s not eating well,”_ and there are questions, like _why_ , _it’s already been so long, why—_

But then Kagami  sets down the plastic cup noisily, crosses his arms, expecting an answer, and Daiki knows he’s treading on ice.

“No reason.” He lets up and slides the card across the table; Kagami stares at it, and then at him, eyebrows creased, eyes weary. Daiki pushes his seat back to stand up. “Let’s head back.”

—

Everything Daiki touches wobbles.

The shelves wobbles, the side tables wobble, the drawers are falling off their hinges, and Daiki watches a stack of upright magazine avalanche off the rack, and he’s shocked speechless as Kagami curses and runs to collect the fallen pamphlets.

“That’s why I needed the screwdriver,” Kagami explains, side-stepping around Daiki to stack the magazines somewhere else. He’s starting to organize through them. “So, can you screw the shelf over there?”

“Screw it yourself—” Daiki says, almost out of habit. (Because come on, he’s dealt with cheeky punks too often and sometimes, he says things with more of a bite to them, which admittedly, gets him into a lot of trouble with his superiors.)

“What did you say—”

“I got it, I got it,” he says hurriedly, narrowly missing the glare that Kagami is throwing him over a stack of the latest issues of Basketball monthly.

—

“Our schedules never worked out so even months after he was discharged, I couldn’t see him,” Tetsu says, calmly.

His eyes glaze as he stares down the counter top, “I invited him to visit me where I worked since it wasn’t too far from the station, but, he made excuses; probably didn’t want to come.”

Daiki rubs his finger over the surface of his glass, suddenly curious; he listens to strung silence and faded jazz as Tetsu draws out a cigarette and his lighter. “Any reason why?”

“It’s the children.” Tetsu smiles, sad and worn. He breathes, a whirl of smoke comes out in puffs. “He hated seeing them.”

Daiki lifts his beer and lets the bubbles fizz against his lips, murmuring. “So what happened?’

“I kept trying,” Tetsu says, eyes sliding shut. He has his cigarette weaved through his fingers and delicately taps it against the ash tray.

“He looked fine, insisted that he was, but he always forgot to take care of himself. So, we’d have maji burgers on some days when I could, or I stayed over with him at times.”

Tetsu says this quietly, with an extra drag of smoke and a deep sigh. He slowly looks up, at the ceiling lights, thin eyelashes casting shadows over the aged lines under his eyes.

Tetsu spares a glance at him, and something cold and uncomfortable breaks dam in him, crawls through his body and he can remember— _Coward,_ Tetsu’s gaze had once said, because Daiki was afraid—scared of _something_ that he couldn’t understand.

“You know... Taiga-kun—” Tetsu starts before his expression softens into a fond smile. He laughs around his cigarette. “He’s gotten a lot better with them now actually. He’s started to visit more; the children love him.”

Daiki has a lump in his throat, and he can’t swallow it down. He grins, cautiously, “That’s good, I guess.”

Nothing is said after that. Tetsu only hums and nods, wistfully breathing out a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Daiki stares into his beer, at the amber color and the swirling foam.

He is reminded of off-white bedsheets and the sterile sting of a hospital room, the silent beeps puncturing the rumble of the air conditioning above, the steady pulse under his fingers, the clammy skin—and afterwards, never again.

Tetsu drops something in front of him, and Daiki startles, hazily looking at it. He registers them as a half-empty pack of vanilla-scented Caster and a cheap lighter.

“You look like you need it,” Tetsu says with a wry smile.

Daiki doesn’t answer, just shuffles a stick out and flicks a switch.

—

Tetsu smokes five cigarettes throughout the span of the night, dropping spent buds into the ash tray, one after another.

Daiki has three beers, two sticks and takes his time as he winds down from yet another somewhat stressful day, muscles loosening under his black shirt.

Aside from the brief talk about Kagami, Tetsu doesn’t talk much and Daiki is grateful for that.

They speak again when Tetsu excuses himself; it’s getting late, he needs to head home. Daiki offers to cover his tab since he’s going to stay a bit longer anyways.

He orders another beer, the bartender obliges.

Vaguely, Daiki wonders how it would have been if he had been there too.

Maybe he’d have visited the hospital with bags and bags of burgers for Kagami to eat, or offered a hand for Kagami to grip when the pain becomes unbearable, or crashed in on days when he just needed a break from brutal police training and lay in the hospital cot to kick back and sleep.

Then he wonders how Kagami would have reacted to that, after five—not ten— years of silence since the end of high school.

Would Kagami have grinned at him and taken it with a stride, or would he have growled at him, demanded him to leave? What could have happened if Daiki stayed more than once?

Daiki sits as the thoughts taper into a silence.

It’s getting late, he should head back.

He slides off the tall barstool and neatly places a few bills under his half-empty pint of beer. Brushing a hand through his short spikes of hair, Daiki weaves past an entering crowd of people and emerges into the lamp filled streets.

He breathes deeply—the air is stifling and so is the weight on his chest—and breathes out.

—

June creeps into July when the cicadas start to sing.

Taiga never really paid much attention to them before since he always just had to walk down the same roads, legs carrying him automatically, mind too occupied with thoughts to properly appreciate the songs from the trees overhead.

But now, Taiga takes his time, head tilted and breathing in the fresh air, watching the bright sunlight dapple the paved sidewalks through a roof of leaves. The cicadas are just as loud as he remembered.

Bugs were some of the things he was not overly fond of; growing up in a city like L.A didn’t help him acclimate to the wilderness at all, so he never enjoyed outdoors things like hiking or ciciada-catching, (though Taiga does have to admit that he’s pretty good at killing cockroaches if anything.)

As he passes by the street courts, he sees a bunch of middle school kids, crowding behind buckets with nets tossed to the side.

_“Ya think he’ll like ‘em?”_

_“We should stick one in his shirt and see—”_

Taiga overhears and smiles—mischievous kids, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he wishes he was just as carefree as they are. He walks home with a bag of bug spray and hums poppy tunes under his breath.

—

(Next day, Aomine comes home completely disheveled with an irritated scowl on his face, Taiga just wonders if he’s got in a fight with his girlfriend—and then realizes, he doesn’t know Aomine enough to even know if he has a girlfriend or not.

He forgets the topic once Aomine grumbles about _damn brats_ , and Taiga remembers that band of three kids on the roadside and _what if_ —nah, maybe not. )

—

On a Tuesday morning, their sofa comes in.

Taiga is the only one in the apartment that opened the door to a deliveryman with a clipboard and a large sofa downstairs.

It was seven in the morning.

Thank god, the man was kind enough to help Taiga move it up the stairs so he can avoid wrestling it up on his own, but once Taiga unwraps the plastic and sets it in front of their coffee table—he knows Aomine isn’t going to like it.

Nobody said the sofas were gonna be heartshaped and blazing red. It looks ridiculous with the additional heart cushions (tossed in as a bonus!), and it suddenly makes sense why they were on sale.

But—a sofa is a sofa and it’s too late to return it.

—  


"I’m not gonna sit in that thing," Aomine growls and his stubbornness is laughable because for the life of him, Taiga doesn’t know what’s wrong with a heart shaped sofa. Sure, it looks wonky and downright embarrassing, but it’s still a place to sit, and Aomine has been glaring at it ever since he came home from work.

Taiga was surprised really, because Aomine doesn’t scowl much now a days, maybe a mild dipped eyebrow, but outright glaring and growling—Taiga can’t believe of all reasons Aomine would have to be angry, he’s angry about a _sofa_.

While giving Aomine a steady stare, Taiga falls back into the couch, the cushions under him let out a withering hiss. It feels nice to have something soft to sit on for once.   
  
"You’re missing out," Taiga says, content with a lazy grin. He can feel Aomine’s glare intensify, and shadows cross over his eyes.   
  
"You never said it was a fucking huge _heart-shaped_ couch," Aomine emphasizes, arms crossed and lip turned downwards.   
  
“No one said it was, and it’s a _love seat_ ," Taiga says with a deflating sigh, eyes slipping closed. It’s hard to imagine a thirty year old acting like a whiny kid and boy does it take him back to the days, when Aomine complained about everything and anything; it’s a little nostalgic, he thinks, and very funny. "A. Love. Seat."

Aomine doesn’t answer, and Taiga's eyes slide open; he can’t help a smirk spreading over his lips; he looks at Aomine with a slight scoff, "Oh,  don’t tell me. You’re scared of what people will say."  
  
"I’m not—"Aomine sputters, and he stoops down to collect the strewn plastic wrapping, crushing it tightly into a ball. "It’s just small and fucking ridiculous."   
  
"Pft, don’t be a baby," Taiga says and laughs when Aomine frowns even more; the lines on his forehead ages him tremendously, but Taiga is a bit too busy trying to catch his breath to point it out. "Look—I’m not that way so you don’t have to worry."   
  
A long pause—too long to be natural.

Taiga swears he sees Aomine’s jaw tighten and fists curl and uncurl. Then Aomine turns, the mood’s gone and Taiga’s laughter stops a little short in his throat.

"Whatever, I’m gonna go out and buy some things, need anything?"  
  
"Restock on some of the pocari," Taiga manages to say with a casual wave.

He shuts his eyes again, listening to the door open and then slam shut.

(It’s been years since then, obviously, that time had been a mistake, slip of the tongue—it’s been ten years, he’s over it and doubts Aomine even remembers. Taiga didn’t say anything wrong did he?)   
  
Taiga sighs again and lets himself drift off into a light nap.

—

  
  
For however much Aomine says he doesn’t want to sit in it, later that week, Taiga finds him lying in it, police cap over his face and arm flung over the sides.

Aomine isn’t moving, probably conserving energy before he goes off to work.

Taiga chokes back his laughter.

Aomine looks very uncomfortable, squeezing onto it horizontally, with his legs tucked up close to his chest and arms sticking out in whatever some way.

(Taiga takes a picture of him though, thinking of sending it to Tetsuya or even Tatsuya, but then he knows that Aomine would probably murder him in his sleep if he does that and Taiga rethinks his life’s choices.)   
  
He ends up fixing Aomine’s arms, folding them back onto the couch— locked elbows are always painful-- and drapes one of their thinner sheets over him. Taiga leaves him in the living room to rummage in their slowly populating fridge.

They have a carton of eggs, thawing meat of some kind (beef, when he squinted) some broccoli, tofu, carrots. On the freezer compartment above, Taiga finds a note stuck under a yellow magnet.

No idea what you meant by hamburger beef, so I just chose the one that looks like it. Next time, be specific.

Taiga sticks it atop the last sticky note, a question about where the laundry detergent was. He pulls out some of the food in the fridge and it’s enough to make a small dish or two, just to cull hunger until Aomine has to disappear off again for his nightly rounds.

—

“Give me your strongest—” Taiga demands as he slides on top of the bar stool. Tatsuya gives him a firm look and then heavily sets down a glass of juice.

“Taiga, did something happen?” And no matter how many times Taiga has seen it, Tatsuya still can be menacing with his poker face and prim smile that just barely hides his  _who do I need to shank now?_ demeanor.

“It was a joke,” Taiga admits and takes the glass. “I just wanted to drop by a bit, had some free time.”

Tatsuya’s smile softens. “It’s nearly one in the morning, what happened to sleeping?”

“Not tired,” Taiga replies, a worn smile curving around the lip of his cup. “How’re things?”

“Uneventful,” Tatsuya says, polishes a wine glass and puts it down. He wipes his hands down on the tails of his maroon vest. “And you?”

Taiga savors the sweet tang of apple juice, and licks a little at the cup for any last remaining drops; he sets it down. “Well, we have a bed now.”

He completely misses the way Tatsuya’s eyebrows raise a fraction in slight (pleasant?) surprise. “Oh, that’s…”

“I was fine without it, really, but Aomine complained about back pain,” Taiga sighs and rakes his fingers through his knotted hair. “We’re just thirty years old and he’s complaining like an old man—”

Tatsuya continues staring at him with that one-eyed surprise, completely silent as Taiga tells him about the adventures of their shared wallet, the sofa, and Aomine’s absolute reluctance to sit in it and—“The thing is, he _uses_ it, he just doesn’t want to admit it, what the hell, man. He’s a sissy because they’re _loveseats_.”

Taiga ends it with a sip from his third glass of juice, and Tatsuya replies with an amused smile, “You’re...amazing, Taiga.”

In which Taiga gives his thanks (both for the compliment and the tiny cup of plum wine Tatsuya allowed him to have,) but he’s not sure why he’d say that.

—

“What’s this?” Daiki asks, lifting up a lavender plastic bag filled with tinted pink macaroons, smells faintly like rose.

“Congratulations on the love sofas,” Atsushi says, an amused crinkle in his eye, turning away to his cooling racks just as Daiki balks.

“It’s not—” He growls and then puts a hand over his face, steaming red. “Quit talking to Himuro—”

—

July typhoons come literally like a storm.

Even after living here for most of his life, Taiga really can’t get used to the fickle weather, when there’s the onslaught of cold rain combo’d with the sticky, moist air.

At least, he’s always prepared with a rain coat in his backpack (since umbrellas are absolutely useless in this weather—and he’s broken at least five before he learned his lesson.)

He heard the storm’s forecast broadcasted on the radio during the entire morning, warnings to stay indoors, and also precautions to stock up on food (which is what Taiga is doing right now; fighting the crowds in the convenient stores, grabbing instant foods and canned foods alike off their barren shelves.)

Taiga emerges from the store when the downpour and gusting winds have already started.

It’s probably not the smartest thing to do, but he braces himself in the weather, and makes a run for it back to the apartment.

—

_[...with winds up to 65 kilometers an hour, people are advised to refrain from going outdoors, evacuate if necessary before violent winds occur, and take appropriate action to protect themselves and property…]_

Daiki flips through the channels, bored as he lazes on his rare day off. He had been napping the entire morning, hasn’t seen Kagami at all since he woke up and he wonders if he had gone out.

He drums his fingers restlessly against the remote control before he decides to make a call.

Daiki swipes at the screen of his phone, taking note of the lack of bars on the top right—ah, no reception. He could send a text, but it’d probably be delayed.

He glances out the balcony window, at the dribbling water cascading down the glass. It’s almost four in the afternoon and the sky has already become dark in this weather.

Kagami should be smart enough to find shelter in this hell storm, and then another thought crosses his mind, a thought that maybe Kagami could be stranded somewhere and has no place to stay for the night since the typhoon is set on to continue into the morning.

But, Kagami is an adult, he shouldn’t worry about him. (Then again this is also the guy who's been sleeping on the floor for months, so Daiki really doubts.)

Daiki stands up and stretches, his neck is in pain and he scratches at it, idly wondering if he should cook up a simple meal for two anyways for the rare case that Kagami _is_ an idiot and decided to dash back instead.   
  
For the umpteenth time, Daiki is glad he’s not on patrol right now, trapped in a police car and keeping an eye peeled for idiots that decide to surf down the streets. (Very, very dangerous; people can be dumb.)   
  
They don’t have much in the fridge, Daiki thinks, but there’s a leftover pot of rice (okay, who on earth put the entire rice cooker in there?) a carton of eggs, a few strands of green onions, some leftover hamburger, vegetables, miso paste, and tofu.   
  
Daiki can’t boast about knowing how to cook the most delicious food, but at least he can cook marginally better than Satsuki—who still is quite helpless around the kitchen. But like what Kagami had once said, food is still food no matter what shape, size or form, even if it ended up transforming into a black lump of coal.

He sets everything down on the counter and pulls out their pan.

Fried rice shouldn’t be too difficult.

—

So he’s made a mess and Kagami’s going to kill him if he doesn't clean up.

Dinner tastes fine by the way; Daiki got through it by adding a tiny dab of miso soup paste (it adds a...pretty good flavor.) But while he was shifting dinner from pan to plate, loose rice just tumbled out, and about one-fifth of their meal ended up splashed over the counter.  
  
He managed to clean up the mess before he hears the keys turning in its knob and Daiki isn’t that surprised, because Kagami _would_ be an idiot and ran through the rain.  
  
"I'm back," Kagami says from the door. He heaves a sigh and there is a wet thump of his bag hitting the floor and several crinkles of plastic bags. "God, it's pouring out there."  
  
"No kidding," Daiki agrees, glancing outside the balcony window. "I thought you were stuck somewhere, but I just finished making dinner. Take a hot shower and it should be ready—"  
  
"Aah, about that," Kagami trails, and Daiki looks at him curiously, but not without catching a glimpse of a whirl of wet hair and a bratty grin— _Yuu._ "I found this kid outside, soaked, he said he was looking for you—"  
  
"Hope you have enough for me too, Daiki," Yuu whistles and bulldozes his way past Kagami and into the living room, completely unannounced and tracking wet puddles onto the floorboards.

Daiki stares, frozen in place—how the hell did _Yuu_ find out where he lived? “Ohh, nice place, why didn’tcha invite us over sooner—”

Kagami grabs the bpy by the scruff of his collar and pushes him down the hall. "Okay, _you_ , take a shower."

Daiki watches them disappear down the hall, expression still blank, and still speechless.

—

"Weren’t you the one that said not to bring kids here," Daiki says after a long silence. He pours a kettle of hot water into a black mug, fills it up and watches the teabag float and then sink to the bottom. “I mean, he’s not a bad kid, but…”

Kagami just crosses his arms and leans back against the counter.  

"Does it look like I had a choice? The kid was wandering around the parking lot, all right?" He answers with a slight growl. Kagami brushes a towel through his damp hair. “Do you have a problem with him or something?”  
  
Daiki pushes the mug towards Kagami who takes it with an appreciative hum.

“No, well. He’s…” Daiki start and then pauses. He places his own mug down against the counter. “Well—I can drive him back."

Kagami blinks, confused. “What?”

“It’s just twenty minutes away,” Daiki explains, brushing past Kagami to their room for his bag and keys. “His parents are probably worrying—”

A hand on his elbow stops him, the grip is firm. Kagami isn’t looking at him, just sips at his hot tea. "It’s fine. The roads are too slippery, it’ll be bad if you got into an accident."

"Then... we’re gonna let this kid stay..."

Kagami shrugs. "He can’t be that annoying."

Daiki tries not to grimace.

—

“Loveseats, huh, woah, _nice_ ,” Yuu says with a crooked, cheeky grin. He tramples around the living room, and walks a half circle around the small, bright red, _fucking_ heart shaped couch _._ “So. Are you and the eyebrows guy—”

“Kagami,” Daiki says, exasperated as he finishes separating the fried rice into three plates. “And no, we’re not.”

An unconvinced look and a slow nod. “ _Mmhm_.”

Daiki can already see it—wildfire gossip about him and Kagami spreading among everyone at the street courts. He can feel the stares tomorrow, questionable stares.

“Why are you even here,” Daiki demands and carries the plate to the glass table. Yuu jump-sits onto the seat, bouncing in it slightly. “I thought I _told_ you guys—”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, we won’t wreck your place again.”

Somehow, that’s not very convincing at all.

Daiki lays out the table, two huge mounds of fried rice and a smaller one on a plate—Daiki knows he won’t die if he doesn’t eat a lot of dinner but the other two, will probably throw a fit at eating lesser than normal.

“Oh man, I missed eatin’ your shitty food,” Yuu says, grabbing the spoon and stabbing it into one of the plates; he starts shoveling rice into his mouth.

“Oi, Kagami’s still showering you know. We eat when everyone’s here,” Daiki says with a frown.

Yuu stares at him with a mouthful of food and slowly sets his spoon down. After chewing slightly, a catty grin appears on his face again.

“Ahh, so you two _are_ —”

Daiki feels his head throb. “It’s called _manners_.”  

—

It’s funny how the steady drizzle of hot water and the mindless motion of lathering soap up his arms invites useless, needless shower thoughts.

Taiga hates thinking.

He doesn’t like assumptions, hates muddying up his perspective.

If there’s one thing he’s learned in the last many years of his life, he knows an awful lot about jumping to conclusions and jumping the gun. It leads to disappointment, failed expectations, and he’s had enough of that.

But now, he thinks.

As he pools a coin-size puddle of shampoo onto his hand—he thinks about that kid standing outside the locked gates, looking up at the apartment, shins muddied and clothes sticking onto his skin.

He thinks about the way the kid looked for a moment, lost and in some ways lonely.

Then, he saw Taiga, lit up with a bright smile and asked, _“Is there a cop named Daiki living around here?_

Taiga wonders if it’s normal that an eleven year old kid would scope out a police officer's apartment and invite himself in.

He remembers Aomine talking about it several times, about working with juvenile delinquents, and being evicted because he let them stay over. But aside from that, the details in Aomine’s job, the things he’s done—

There’s so little that Taiga actually knows.

Aomine used to like teriyaki burgers and banana milk (maybe he still does).

Aomine used to play in the BJ leagues, but for which team—? Taiga can’t remember.

From the times, Aomine stayed the nights over, Taiga knows that he used to wake up at the crack of dawn but rolled in bed, content with playing on his phone until Taiga wrestled out from his sheets.

But see, the thing is, all these are _used to_ ’s.

They’ve been sharing an apartment (and even a bed) for nearly a month now. And while they’ve settled to dealing with each other civilly (with mild disagreements,) there’s not much that he actually knows.

What was Aomine doing for the last ten years?

What happened after he became a police officer?

What kind of people did he meet?

Does he have a girlfriend?—if he does, why didn’t he move in with her?

It’s a mild, nagging curiosity of his. Interrogating Aomine about the past ten years of his life, would be unfair if Taiga didn’t reciprocate. But this sudsy revelation of the fact that Taiga _doesn’t_ _know_ —it’s uncomfortable.

Aomine—for a lack of a better word—was a close friend in the past.

But.

People grow, people change.

Taiga’s not exactly sure what he was expecting, but _this_ Aomine, the Aomine that is anyone but the self-centered eighteen year old brat that he was, was not it.

Taiga doesn’t know if he’s startled or pleasantly surprised.

It does render him speechless from time to time, and it makes room for unwanted thoughts, that he’s the only one who hasn’t changed, stuck in his own time as everyone moves forward.

He emerges from the shower, warm and comfortable in his own clothes, and runs a towel over his hair.

Not after opening the door, he hears a distant banter from the living room.

“Daiki, ‘s too salty—”

“If you’re gonna complain so much, stop eating.”

Aomine wipes at Yuu’s mouth roughly with the corner of a napkin, ignoring the complaints and whine, and also dodging the occasional fist flailing into his arm.

And although Aomine grumbles, there’s a touch of fondness in the corners of his eyes as he orders Yuu to hold still, and it’s something that Taiga really hasn’t noticed before.

When did Aomine start looking so gentle?

Yuu catches Taiga staring and perks up, a rice grain still stuck on his chin. “Oh, hey, eyebrows man’s done—”

Taiga frowns at the ridiculous nickname. "Hey—"

“His name’s Kagami,” Aomine says after planting a firm hand on Yuu’s head and ruffling his hair. "If you don't behave he's going to punt you back into the streets."

Taiga can’t help but laugh at that and agree.

—

Taiga’s in the middle of washing the dishes before a hand sneaks to the sleeves of his sweater and pulls. “Psst, where does Daiki keep his porn stash?”

He blinks and looks down, suddenly aware of how small and tiny this kid is—(or maybe Taiga had always been a giant even in middle school.) “Say what?”

“Y’know, the ladies with the hangin’ boobs and all that,” Yuu says, but he lets go of Taiga’s sleeve and flops to lean against the counter. Taiga gives him the longest stare—what the hell is Aomine teaching this kid?

Taiga glances toward the hallway, where the bathroom is, where Aomine’s taking his turn to shower and then he looks back down, at this odd kid he’s only met outside, drenched in rain.

“Uh…”

Taiga doesn’t exactly have the energy to deal with obnoxious cheeky kids—not to mention, he’s not exactly sure _how_ to act around them, so he just pats his damp hand on Yuu’s shoulder carefully.

“Why don’t you watch some TV—”

“Geh, ‘s boring.” And Yuu doesn’t budge, just glues himself to the counter and idly grabs at the spices lying near the stove. “And ‘s not workin’, I think it’s the storm.”

Taiga snatches the black pepper out of his hands and puts it somewhere else, farther from reach. He sighs a little, “Stop touching things.”

There’s a long silence after that, and he had to double check to see if the kid was still there, next to him, as he finishes rinsing the plates. Taiga had expected him to be fiddling with some other utensil or causing more trouble where he’s at, but Yuu is oddly quiet, contemplative, and then he draws a breath.

“Y’know, mom and dad were fightin’ again.”

Taiga pauses for a second; the water continues to glide down his hand and funnel down the drain. From the corner of his eye, Taiga sees a hand picking up the small container of salt, and short fingernails flicking at the adhesive labeling.

“...I’m kinda tired of it.”

Taiga turns off the water, wipes his hand on the hand towel hanging near the counter. He looks up contemplatively, staring into the living room.

If he can say anything, he’s not sure what to say.

Because here’s a kid Taiga had barely met and acquainted over the span of a few hours, over dinner and nightly shows, and yet here the kid is, all smiles missing and wearing the smallest change of clothes Taiga could find, and offering a glimpse into his life story and innermost thoughts.

Taiga doesn’t know what to do, so he rests his hand on top of Yuu’s head, ruffles it like how he’s seen Aomine do it, and gently pushes him out from the kitchen.

“You should get some rest.”

—

“Ohh, so you managed to block ‘im then!” Yuu says in wonder, nearly toppling off the sofa as he bounces, a little too hyper at the “bedtime” story Kagami’s telling.

It’s not easy putting a kid to sleep, Daiki has realized over the months of babysitting his band of three brats. Usually he’d just let them tire themselves until they fall flat on their back in the middle of his living room, and he’d just drape thin sheets over them like dead bodies at a crime scene.

But Kagami is sitting on the other side of the couch, knee drawn up to his chest, drawing aimless trails into the fleece of one of those heart pillows, and with a loose smile, recounts the last minutes left in the quarter and how he had passed the ball to #14 from a tight spot.

Daiki vaguely remembers this game—Tokyo Cinq Rêves vs. Saitama Broncos, it was a semi-finalist match held the year after he had stepped down from being Yokohama’s power forward.

But rather than reminisce the details, Daiki is mesmerized with how Kagami talks— with a light laugh pulling at the corners of his mouth as he remembers his teammates, the ridiculous cheer they’d chant before a game; Kagami’s posture, relaxed, and the angles and shadows in his face smoothed, his fingertips drum, drumming along into the heart shaped cushion.

“He’s asleep.”

Daiki blinks and Kagami has moved, pushed aside the pillow so he can reach over to pull away the half-filled, now luke-warm mug of milk from Yuu’s quickly relaxing grip.

“You seem kind of out of it too,” Kagami says, hushed voice coming out hoarse. There’s a smirk in his smile as he sets the mug onto the coffee table, next to Daiki’s cup of tea. “You were staring; did you like my story that much?”

“Uh, no—” Daiki startles, but quickly catches himself. “I mean. It’s. Surprising.”

“What?” Kagami laughs, as there’s a slight dip in his stupidly weird eyebrows. He shakes his head while lifting Yuu’s head and sneaking a pillow underneath. “Playing in the BJ leagues?”

“No, I mean—Tokyo Cinq Rêves,” Daiki blurts out; he leans back, palm pressing into the floor, scrambling to continue his thoughts. “That is....Why that team?”

Kagami considers for a moment and then shrugs. “Can’t remember, it just seemed like a good choice at the time.”

—

12:24 am on a stormy midnight, Daiki sets down their mugs of tea on the floor and collapses on the tiny mattress next to Kagami, thoroughly exhausted but at least, Yuu is fast asleep on their loveseat with a sheet tucked over him.

Kagami is on his stomach, sprawled over half the mattress and reading a magazine, ESPN, English, mailed to him from America, some days ago. Daiki sits at the edge, arms resting over his knees, and he stares at a wall, listening to the rain dribble down rusted pipes just outside their window.

(Daiki tries not to imagine— the possibility that Kagami had joined the team that rivaled against his, just to meet him at the tournaments.

He tries not to imagine— Kagami standing on the official courts a year after Daiki had retired, waiting and wondering where he is.

Daiki tries not to let his mind spin up possibilities, scenarios, the probable, sure-disappointment on Kagami’s face when he had realized Daiki wasn’t there, and—)

“Tired?” Kagami asks with a slight nudge into Daiki’s side. When Daiki looks at him, he sees curious, red eyes peering at him, Kagami is halfway through the magazine, his thumb pressing down at the corner.

Daiki collapses onto Kagami’s back, letting out an amused huff when he hears him squawk underneath him. “Yeah, tired. You’re on my bed.”

“Get the fuck off me and I’ll move,” Kagami says, without a threatening edge in his voice.

A page of the magazine is turned and Daiki shuts his eyes against the slow, serene breathing he feels through the rise and fall of Kagami’s back.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Daiki sighs, a little drunk on exhaustion and over thinking, and continues to listen as the night rains on.

—

The morning smells like fresh grass and wet sidewalks. Taiga pushes open the balcony door a bit further to invite the after-storm chill. He curiously rubs at the glass stained with dried water marks.

The storm had trickled to an end sometime around three in the morning, and Taiga had spent the entire night, tossing about, rolling around the floor, trying to escape the wet heat crawling on his skin.

It was a broken and interrupted sleep, but like always, he woke up at five on the dot, leaving the bedroom floor after folding up his sheets and piling it on top of his pillow.

He had snuck into the living room to find that Yuu sleeps like a mess, arms and legs everywhere and sheet and cushions tumbled onto the floor.

As Taiga picks up after him, he’s reminded of a memory, of a summer beach inn, of tatami mats and strewn futons, and loud, unbridled snoring from a guy he had been forced to room with. (And ironically, still is.)

“Hungry,” Taiga hears before he sees him. Aomine rummages through the cupboard, fishing out two, no—three mugs and placing them down on the table. “You’re up early; making breakfast?”

Taiga blinks, surprised because he hadn’t even noticed him getting up.

“Was planning to. Miso soup and toast,” Taiga says as he makes his way over from the living room. He watches Aomine set down a kettle of water before he opens the fridge to place ten eggs into a metallic bowl. “Though, it looks like you have the eggs covered.”

“It’s not rocket science,” Aomine grouses, still sleepy, still half-dressed with a pair of basketball shorts nearly slipping off his hips, with that ridiculous patch of bedhead hair sticking out like a sore thumb. “I can fry things.”

“Of course, of course,” Taiga says as it’s his turn to open the fridge, pulling out the containers of miso paste and tofu. He spots the kettle steaming and reaches over to move it off the stove. “Though I have to say, the rice was a bit salty last night.”

The pan sizzles as Aomine cracks an egg into a small pool of oil. “Shut up, at least I _know_ how to cook.”

“Yeah?” Taiga laughs as he fills their mugs with hot water and packets of instant coffee (though, milk for the kid). “You used to burn everything down in the kitchen; remember how you wanted to microwave bread and you left it with its aluminum wrap? Fucking almost caused a fire that time.”

Taiga feels a knee knock into his leg and Aomine is hiding a sheepish grin as he pokes and prods at the quickly cooking egg.

“I was young and stupid. I know how to use the oven now,” Aomine bites back. Taiga huffs and gives a glance at the browned white egg.

“Oi, you’re burning it,” Taiga snorts and reaches over to grab at his pair of chopsticks.

“The hell—you can still eat it like this.” Aomine grumbles, but surrenders them anyways; he goes on to watch Taiga wiggle his chopsticks underneath the egg.

“…See, it’s stuck onto the pan.”

“Still can eat it.’”

And Taiga splats the egg onto one of the three clean plates atop the counter. He makes an idle comment about Aomine not putting enough oil and how he’s poked and prodded until the yolk broke and made a mess.

Aomine only shrugs and hovers close by, poorly hiding his fascination when Taiga flips an egg while maintaining the soft yolk inside.

When Kagami plates it, he preens with pride. Aomine glares but demands him to try it again, since the first was probably a fluke.

 _How long do you think I’ve been cooking_? Taiga jokes as he perfectly folds a frying egg in half and gloats when Aomine glares at him with a frown and admits his defeat.

And by then, Taiga had ended up frying all ten eggs, plating them next to slices of (unevenly) buttered bread. He’s told himself not to laugh but Taiga can’t help but snort at how it’s almost a struggle for Aomine to be in the kitchen, cooking things. (And he wonders, how on earth has Aomine survived on his own for all these years?)  

It’s a brief moment— one when Taiga watches Aomine cut misshapen cubes from tofu for their soup—as their quiet banter tapers into silence, and his lazy smile softens into something more contemplative.  

This feels new, and different, Taiga absently thinks, but familiar too, and it’s been a long while, since they were both like this. In sleep-wrinkled clothes (or lack of) and hair mussed in all sorts of ways with the slightest tang of sweat from the heat overnight, standing in a kitchen, cooking breakfast for three.

The apartment suddenly looks different—with a mess of discarded tofu boxes and used spoons and egg-crusted chopsticks on the kitchen counter, and Aomine, concentrating, bottom lip under his teeth, and the _glub, glub_ sounds as tofu slides into the pot.

It's fuller, less empty, with waft of breakfast filling every corner, and Taiga thinks a small tune in his head to accompany the slight clacks of the ladle hitting against the rim of the pot.

(As the food is plated and miso soup poured, they nearly tangle themselves on the way out of the kitchen, almost knocking over their plate of eggs or sloshing the milk and coffee from the mugs in their hands.

Has the kitchen always been this cramped? Taiga wonders after muttering a small curse.

He steps back and tries to step around, but it’s a small space and Aomine isn’t the most coordinated either because he bumps into Taiga again, their arms and elbows everywhere and chests nearly touching, Aomine’s breath brushes the side of his face, and there are overlaps of, _Sorry, wait, the mugs are—_ and _Fuck, okay, why don’t you move this way, and I’ll—_ and then.

“Oh.”

The moment freezes, the world stops spinning, and Taiga can see color brightly flush into Aomine’s face at the cheeky grin Yuu is giving them just from the kitchen entrance.

“Ahh, I was wonderin’ what the noise was, and I _see_ now—”

“Yuu _, shut up_ —” Aomine hisses, and he manages to step away, miraculously holding onto three mugs with one hand as he plants the other onto the back of Yuu’s head and ushers him out. “Say anything and I’ll skin you alive.”

“Ow, ow, ow—that _hurts—’_

Taiga blinks, confused—what’s that about?—and watches Aomine wrestle Yuu into the living room. He nearly forgets that he was still holding onto the plate of eggs and toast, warming his palms through the porcelain plates.)

—

"Another fire," Hiwatori says, using a metal rod to turn over a burnt garbage can. At the mouth of the alley, a crowd is forming but a yellow caution tape forms a successful blockade around the site. "It's happening a lot more often, huh."

"There are intervals though" Daiki says, straightening his back. He lifts a zipped bag with a tossed lighter tucked snugly inside. "Think this'll give us fingerprints?"

The aged cop gives him a grunt, and pulls his cap back over his eyes; he squints anyways, in the glaring sun of a mid-summer day. "Doubt it. If the guy was as careless as that, we would've already caught him."

"I guess so," Daiki hums, turning to look at the blinking lights from the ambulance and fire truck not too far away. Aside from a few store owners and customers inhaling the smoke, there hadn’t been any serious casualties, none that required immediate hospital attention.

"Anyhow, we should ask the civilians if they saw anyone suspicious, could help us build a working profile," Hiwatori huffs and storms through the spilled trash bags and the burnt floor of the alley.

Daiki follows, idly surveying the crowd of paramedics and firefighters before a flicker of red catches his eye. The man's back is turned but there can only be one guy that tall with a whirl of red hair on his head.

Kagami.

“Aomine, are you coming along?” Hiwatori asks, distantly, stopping just as he crossed the caution tape.

Daiki hesitates before he turns on his heels.

He waves at his partner. “Ahh, go ahead first,  I’ll join you later.”

—

It takes him a while to wade through the paramedics and other police officers (from the arson department) to get to where Kagami is, dressed in blazing orange—part of the rescue team, probably.

Kagami has a slight smudge of ash and dirt on his cheek, but aside from that he seems unfazed from the fire a few hours ago.

He's as composed as he usually is, standing with a hand propped on his hip, talking away with a coworker of his.

Daiki manages to catch bits and pieces of conversation as he comes to a small clearing near the back of the fire truck.

“I’m just glad we cleared the area before the fire hit the gas tank,” the woman says with a frown and wipes her face with the back of her hand. “I can’t imagine how big the explosion would’ve been.”

“I guess so,” Daiki hears Kagami sigh, exasperated. “When the hell is police gonna catch this guy, it’s already been months—”

“Give us a break, it’s barely been _a_ month,” Daiki scoffs, effortlessly sliding in and sneaking a casual arm around Kagami’s shoulders; he feels him stiffen under his touch before it eases a split second later when surprise turns into a growl. “We’ve already cross-referenced all previous reports and statements; seeing if it’s some repeat offender or just a kid.”

“And?” Kagami dusts Daiki off and takes a step back, folding his arms.

“It’s all over the place,” Daiki says with a shrug. “Amateur and professional work combined; you would know, you’re the ones who find the fire’s starting point.”

Daiki gives it a moment, watching Kagami deflate a little whilst rolling his eyes, before he turns to Kagami’s coworker, he offers a polite bow.  “Lieutenant…?”

“Minoru Sachiko,” she says returning the bow with a slight nod. “I don’t sit well with honorifics.”

“Aomine Daiki,” he responds with a grin, amused when Kagami makes a face at that. “I’m Kagami's housemate."

There's a few seconds where he sees Minoru’s eyebrows shoot up and a secretive smile spreads on her lips. “Oh, so you’re the reason why Kagami-kun has—”

“All right, you, get back to work,” Kagami says loudly, crossing right in front of her and grabbing Daiki by the shoulders. “We need to do some damage control and you’re in our way.”

Daiki blinks but lets himself be ushered away. “Ah, right, right.”

He takes few steps toward the flicker of red lights among the police cars, but hesitates for a while. “I’m getting off early, need me to grab anything for dinner?”

“We ran out of salt. And get some paper towels too,” Kagami answers, and Daiki doesn’t miss the way Minoru snickers just a little. “Now shut up and go away.”

“Will do, will do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. This is all I have left. _(:3;; Unfortunately I don't have any more of this fic sitting in my documents. Maybe one day I'll pick it up again but it's such an awfully long and slow burn style that it'll just take too long for me to get anywhere with it. 
> 
> In the next chapter, I'll just collect and refine some other oddball snippets. We'll see how it goes. _(:3
> 
> anyways, thank you for your patience and again, I apologize for not continuing through with this fic. Maybe some day...maybe one day _(:3


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